Word: soldiering
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...film with such a unanimously powerful opening and an attention to history that is emotionally edifying and alive. Still, the connecting material by which Robert Rodat's script moves from the opening battle sequence to the last is less than wholly compelling, and the framing device of the ex-soldier in the cemetery is maudlin and cumbersome. But Spielberg hasn't gotten an ending right in at least ten years. Disputation seems insolent in the case of this film. --Nicholas K. Davis...
Nominally a cobbler's apprentice, his master is in jail so often that Pin never works. His older sister is a prostitute whose most frequent customer is a German soldier. This makes her an unpopular figure in certain quarters of Italy during World War II. Pin sleeps in the same room that his sister conducts her business in, and so is precociously knowledgeable about sex. He unhesitatingly shares this with peers, who are fascinated, but find him too different to befriend. Shunned, Pin hangs around a bar and tries to entertain the adults with bawdy songs and neighborhood gossip, rewarded...
...Roos (The Opposite of Sex), Darren Aronofsky ([Pi]) Tommy O'Haver (Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss). Familiar renegades prove they can expand on their obsessions: Hal Hartley in Henry Fool, Neil LaBute in Your Friends and Neighbors. An old timer like James Ivory displays renewed grace with A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. And this fall four filmmakers who made a collective splash in 1995 and '96 are presenting works that offer hope for a better, bolder American moviescape...
...Hollywood, slavery and its infamous legacy have begun to serve as outlets for ambitious filmmaking, whether through wrenching visual impact or intense emotional experience. In recent memory, Edward Zwick delved into the psyche of the black soldier for his sweeping Civil War epic Glory, while Steven Spielberg intertwined visually jarring images of slavery with courtroom drama in Amistad...
...from Jeremy Davies (the milk-livered translator), and an attention to history that is emotionally edifying and alive. Still, the connecting material by which Robert Rodat's script moves from the opening battle sequence to the last is less than wholly compelling, and the framing device of the ex-soldier in the cemetery is maudlin and cumbersome. But Spielberg hasn't gotten an ending right in at least 10 years. Again, disputation seems insolent in the case of this film, but in this mediocre summer, even the best films bore compromises that were hard to ignore. Nicholas K. Davis...