Word: niro
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Moral criticism of adultery having become unfashionable, we must make do with the inconvenience of the thing as the last barrier against total sexual anarchy. If the experience of Frank Raftis (Robert De Niro) and Molly Gilmore (Meryl Streep) is typical, the difficulty of arranging a discreet tryst remains a powerful weapon on the side of the angels. Indeed, Falling in Love shows an extramarital affair to be the neutron bomb of interpersonal relations, capable of wiping out all intelligent life, leaving only the bare generic conventions of romantic fiction standing stark against...
...Niro's performance consists mostly of doleful looks, Streep's of brushing back her hair and giving two vigorous nods whenever she tells a lie, and that says it all about Ulu Grosbard's lugubrious direction. The name of the picture being knocked off here is Brief Encounter, not Closely Watched Trains, but of course, what we are dealing with here is not moviemaking but star packaging. Next time they should remember the gift wrap...
...heart of both films is a cautionary fable that spans nearly five decades of American antisocial history: from 1921, when a teen-age gang of Jewish punks assembles in their Manhattan ghetto, to 1933, when the gang's leaders, Noodles (Robert De Niro) and Max (James Woods), tumble into betrayal, to 1968, when the old men meet to act out their perverse codes of honor. Leone filmed the story in the luscious, mythic style that he developed in his popular "spaghetti westerns" with Clint Eastwood and perfected in Once upon a Time in the West (1969), an outsider...
...Woodward heads up the investigative reporting staff, is drawing the kind of hoopla usually kindled by more conventional show-biz behemoths; an excerpt has also appeared in Playboy. Like some Hollywood superproduction, the book boasts a long list of cameo appearances by stars (Jack Nicholson, Robin Williams, Robert De Niro, Carrie Fisher and miscellaneous The Rolling Stones) whose presence has nothing of importance to contribute save what agents and producers like to call "name value...
...Reynolds) made the same list in 1981. The s author underscores what all this means to lowly screenwriters: "Stars will not play weak and they will not play blemished, and you better know that now." Exceptions to this rule? Goldman raises some only to demolish them: "Of course De Niro will play a psychopath in Taxi Driver. Some psychopath - he risks his life trying to save the virtue of your everyday ordinary-looking child prostitute, Jodie Foster...