Before and After (1996)

When their teenage son is suspected of murder, Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, as the boy's parents, must grapple with small-town police friends, lawyers, vigilantes, and their own feelings of culpability over covering up the crime, in Barbet Schroeder's earnest but a touch too pat adaptation of Rosellen Brown's book.

★★★☆☆

CIMECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

八っ墓村 (Yatsuhaka-mura) (Eight Tomb Village)(1996)

Seishi Yokomizo's mystery novel, encompassing 1577 civl war events, a spree killing in the 1930s (inspired by a horrible true event), and then a more contemporary village murder mystery, is a convoluted mess (on top of these occasions of mass murder spread over 400 years, there's portentous lightning strikes, identical twins, hidden treasure, mummified bodies, a labyrinth, madness, a curse, and village unrest) and while director Ichikawa Kon's 1996 remake sticks more closely to the plot of the book than the 1977 adaptation, it still makes the sensible choice to cut some fat off the book's bones, presenting an enjoyable mystery less convoluted than the book, downplaying the horror of the 1977 version and up-playing the English mystery elements, injecting into the mystery much more of Kindaichi Kousuke, the private detective, who is trying to discover who is poisoning the residents of "Eight Tomb Village" while also investigating how the murders are related to the arrival in town of handsome Tatsuya Tajimi, a young man just told he is heir to the enormous Tajimi fortune.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Primal Fear (1996)

No, not a Jurassic Park sequel or a Saw episode but a courtroom drama based on a William Diehl book with a title that bears little relevance to its story of a lawyer who represents an altarboy accused of the stabbing murder of a priest.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Labyrinth (1996)

Imagine The Dark Crystal, Fraggle Rock, and The Muppets all rolled up in one and you've got something close to this other Jim Henson project, a 1996 musical fantasy with a cult following about Dorothy Gale-like Sarah transported to an Oz-like otherworld where she encounters characters the Fireys, Ludo, and Hoggle, who assist her on her quest to rescue her baby brother from David Bowie's Goblin King, Jareth.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The First Wives Club (1996)

Three women played by Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton are jilted by their husbands and so band together to exact revenge in this comedy popular among middle-aged women, mostly funny, at least for its first half, but let down by an unrewarding last half and unnecessary voiceover narration (probably to emulate the voice of the bestselling book upon which the movie is based.)

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Evita (1996)

This film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical attempts to reduce decades of Argentinian history into two hours of Tim Rice's bawdy rhyming couplets and because of this is an almost unwatchable movie-length rock opera music video featuring, among other embarrassments, suited Argentinian statesmen rapping to funky synthesizers, Antonio Banderas drifting around as a everywhere narrator who often has to nod and look unembarrassed as he waits a beat or two for the music to let him finish what he is saying, bawdy rhymes about Argentina's reverred/abhorred Eva Peron played by an out-of-her-depth Madonna and, the musical's biggest sin, apart from repeated scenes shot on the balcony of the Casa de Rosa, an almost entirely absent Buenos Aires.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Craft (1996)

The feminist subtext of 1987s The Witches of Eastwick is thoroughly undone in this misguided teenage witch movie made nine years later: where Sukie, Alexandra and Jane were a unified coven of creators of men, music, sculpture, and babies, here, a group of sullen teenage emos are literally to blame for magicking sexual assault upon themselves, immediately turn batshit crazy when faced with male rejection, are ultimately punished for their black arts by a flippantly introduced omniscient "he", and before you argue that comparison is unfair, it is Skeet Ulrich's high school jock who first uses the unflattering term 'the Bitches of Eastwick'.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

Director Robert Rodriguez and writer Quentin Tarantino display their penchant for talky, stylised violence and fun unconstrained by genre conventions with this road movie that halfway through suddenly changes into a vampire horror, a precursor to their later grindhouse collaborations.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Apartment (L'Appartement) (1996)

An engaged-to-be-married but duplicitous young man in Paris tries to track down a former lover but despite gaining access to her apartment and at times getting so close to her he can hear and even smell her, his efforts are repeatedly thwarted; it isn't until much further into this twisty, turny, and quite convoluted 1996 romantic mystery, one that is at times distinctly Hitchcockian and at others very 'Polanski', that the mystery of the lover's elusiveness is made clear.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jerry Maguire (1996)

As far as I can tell, the point of this entertaining but slightly mystifying feelgood comedy-drama is that there are corporate dangers in being authentic but enormous personal gains, as demonstrated by Tom Cruise's title character who through being too honest commits career suicide but falls in love with Renee Zellweger's Dorothy Boyd and becomes a successful agent to Cuba Gooding Junior's memorable football star Rod Tidwell.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Star Trek First Contact (1996)

Heralding a new era of Star Trek movie quality and a departure from the 80s kitsch of the Shatner movies, First Contact improves on the less interesting Generations, bringing the Enterprise in contact with an Earth under threat from the Borgs, and is entertaining despite several scenes in which James Cromwell groovily dances.

★★★☆☆

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Mission: Impossible (1996)

Heralding a Hollywood trend that continues today (that of television series being reinvented as mega movies) Brian de Palma's Mission: Impossible made a big impact with its big name stars - Tom Cruise, Kirstin Scott Thomas, Jon Voight - and with its tv-style credit opening, with its thrilling plot and set pieces on a scale far bigger than its tv namesake, and it paved the way for three lesser sequels and a slew of similarly big budget 80s-tv inspired blockbusters (Charlies Angels, A Team, Lost In Space, Miami Vice...)

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS