Word: niro
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...BOTTOM LINE: A remake of a 1950 film noir provides Robert De Niro with a star turn around a muddy track...
...full of false confidence and authentic desperation. He is Harry Fabian, a small-time New York City lawyer possessed by what he thinks are big-time dreams -- though the rest of us may not quite see them that way. He is played at full throttle by Robert De Niro in Night and the City, a movie that is, in its essence, a series of verbal arias for the star, occasions to demonstrate bravura technique...
Indeed, as they lurch toward a conclusion that is merely melodramatic -- and rather lamely so -- you begin to wonder why, setting aside the opportunities for superficial flash offered to De Niro, anyone bothered with this enterprise, which is, in fact, a remake of a middling 1950 noir drama. It probably would have required the dark glamour of period conventions and convictions to sustain it. Director Irwin Winkler succeeds mainly in conveying his own edginess, and screenwriter Richard Price cannot seem to get his people grounded either in reality or in a metaphorically persuasive fictional realm. The result is a nervous...
...Bronx is on a roll. Houghton Mifflin paid $500,000 for Clockers, and Universal Pictures is putting up $1.9 million for the film rights and a screenplay Price will write. Two more Price-scripted movies, Mad Dog and Glory and Night and the City, both starring Robert De Niro, are set for release this year. Earlier Price credits for The Color of Money and Sea of Love helped put him on Hollywood's A list. "He writes character first and then builds the story around the character," says Al Pacino, who starred in Sea of Love. "That's very good...
...movie's global reach is a large part of the problem. Things would be a lot more exciting if the implacable crazy were constantly hanging around the neighborhood, turning every shadow, shrub and fast-food joint into a potential menace (see Robert De Niro in Cape Fear). And the film's fascination with the CIA's high-tech capabilities for worldwide surveillance of miscellaneous creeps is not as stirring as its makers seem to think. It leads to lots of shots of people intently staring into computer screens or exchanging testy dialogue in small rooms...