Word: rubens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIRECTOR: JOSEPH RUBEN...
...Joseph Ruben's apparent mission in life is to turn the commonplaces of family dysfunction into worst-case scenarios. Everyone at some time or another imagines comfortable domesticity going radically wrong. Ruben gives this uneasy feeling -- that we all may be no more than a mischance or two away from reading our names in a tabloid headline -- grabby if sometimes almost comically simple life on the screen. In Ruben's The Stepfather, that eponymous figure turns out to be -- his stepchildren guess it! -- a serial killer. In Sleeping with the Enemy, Julia Roberts' character fakes her own death trying...
That's what's good about Ruben. He doesn't mess around with nuance. He sticks to the psychological basics and the most primitive scare tactics. Nothing distracts him from arriving, via the shortest possible distance, at some not exactly subtle but inescapably gripping point. It ain't art. Nobody's ever going to call him the new Hitchcock. But there's something admirable in his disdain for high, fancy stepping, his heedlessly efficient drive to put us in touch with the primal ooze of our worst imaginings...
...need Clarence Gainer. We need Ruben Sterns. But they should not have been pitted against each other," Kimbow said...
Committee Superintendent Mary Lou McGrath's nominated Boston school Administrator Ruben L. Stern for the permanent position of assistant house master. The nomination of Stern, who is Hispanic, provoked sharp criticism from audience members who accused her of "pitting minority against minority...