Word: whoduniteer
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Skillful direction makes Jennifer 8 a taut whodunit...
Like Berlin, we know better. What we're not prepared for is the way writer- director Bruce Robinson, who created the marvelously quirky Withnail & I a few years ago, develops his material. Jennifer 8 (the first victim was named Jennifer) is a classic whodunit, with clues fairly laid out (often visually) and the suspense tightening as pursuer and pursued draw closer together. It is also a persuasive portrayal of an increasingly tense cop community (John Malkovich contributes a tough, scary FBI interrogator grilling Berlin when false suspicion focuses on him). Finally, aided immeasurably by the great Conrad Hall's darkly...
...Whodunit is one of Washington's favorite games, in which the object is to figure out who were the major players behind important policy decisions in the White House or Congress. Though the game gets harder when the decisions come from the tight-lipped precincts of the Supreme Court, it was being played in earnest last week in an attempt to figure out one of the court's most unexpected rulings in years. Someone cobbled together a Roe-friendly majority that included three conservatives -- Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter...
...Douglas) and a bisexual novelist (Sharon Stone) who may do her sharpest work with an ice pick, has some steamy skin scenes; that's what all the ratings ruckus was about. (The film lost less than a minute and got an R.) But there's something wrong with a whodunit if, at the end, viewers are still asking, "O.K., who done it?" The answer is director Paul Verhoeven. And the next question...
...production design, in the heartless and relentless thrill seeking of Paul Verhoeven's direction, in the too intricate, not entirely persuasive plotting required to create an alternate suspect, a police psychiatrist (Jeanne Tripplehorn) who truly loves Douglas. Finally, the film breaks faith with the most inviolable convention of the whodunit -- refusing to state firmly which of the two women dunit (notwithstanding gay activists' confident naming of one of them, in a publicity campaign aimed at undermining the movie). This reflects its fundamental flaw of arrogance, a smug faith in the ability of its own speed, smartness and luxe...