Ismail Merchant, James Ivory, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala forged a producer-director-writer team that began exploring the clash of cultures about two decades before it became fashionable. With India as the arena and the Raj as context, the piquancy of their unique Indian-American-European perspective on this oh-so-very-British—and, to a lesser extent, Indian—subject, starting with the delectable Shakespeare Wallah (1965), was often lost on all three continents.

Cotton Mary, Merchant’s fourth directorial venture (which opens in New York on February 11), a film about the gradual destruction of an

SEVENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD Richard Farnsworth’s performance in David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999) has a beautiful, disarming nakedness: There doesn’t seem to be anything between the elements and his weathered skin except the stubborn pride the old actor projects. As seventy-three-year-old Alvin Straight, who can barely walk yet drives a battered lawn mower nearly 300 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his sick, estranged brother, Farnsworth takes in the world and his own increasing frailty with an aching watchfulness. Farnsworth’s eyes articulate what Straight himself can’t put into words,

Film critics and buffs, even connoisseurs of the offbeat, have such a fierce love-hate relationship with Harmony Korine that it’s easy to forget the splash he made as the precocious teenage screenwriter of photographer Larry Clark’s film debut, Kids (1995). Clark’s protégé has since written and directed the daring if unpopular Gummo (1997) as well as his Dogma-accred-ited second feature, Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), while Clark has man-aged only Another Day in Paradise (1998), a clunky, misshapen crime thriller as flimsy excuse to fuss over the beautiful Vincent Kartheiser—suggesting that, when it

DEDICATED “TO ALL ACTRESSES who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to be mothers,” and last but not least, to his own mom, Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, which opened the New York Film Festival in September, is a gender- and genre-bending tale of grief and renewal. The thirteenth film by the director of such previous international hits as Dark Habits (1983), Matador (1986), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), and most recently Live Flesh (1997), All About My Mother walks the fine line between melodrama and

AS YOU LIKE IT? First-time director Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (which opened in October) dramatizes the true-life story of Teena Brandon, the small-town Nebraskan girl who lived and loved as a boy until she was brutally raped and murdered in 1993 for getting caught at it. Like the recent Matthew Sheppard killing, Brandon’s senseless death reverberated in the hollows of the American psyche, pitting our collective intolerance of sexual deviancy against our personal abhorrence of thuggery. While the historical record is a case study worthy of Gender Theory 101, Peirce’s docudrama harks back

BY LEAVING HIS CUSTOMARY Canadian settings and cast of regulars behind in this adaptation of William Trevor’s novel Felicia’s Journey, director Atom Egoyan may have intended to challenge himself by filtering his customary preoccupations with family dysfunction and video technology through someone else’s vision. But the result falls far short of his 1997 adaptation of Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter.

Here, Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), a pregnant Irish teenager, travels to England in search of her baby’s father and winds up in the clutches of the obsessional factory manager Hilditch (Bob Hoskins).

IN 1954, WHEN I WAS A PINK-CHEEKED lad of a mere thirteen years, our family—newly returned to Los Angeles from the aging, sooty confines of Cleveland—paid a visit to an old friend of my father’s who’d made it big at Capitol Records and built a house on Webster Drive, in LA’s Silver Lake district. The house was a simple box, half redwood and half glass, with a little stainless-steel trim. The far wall of the living room was entirely glass, looking out onto a sparse deck and, beyond, a spectacular view of the Silver Lake reservoir. Standing for the first time in the living room, I thought the home

“Instant books” first appeared in the ’70s: thin, hastily written paperbacks designed to hit drugstore and airport sales racks while public interest in a political event or celebrity scandal remains fresh. The ’90s have given us the academic instant book, collections of essays that, because of the slow pace of scholarly publication, generally appear after public interest in whatever “hot” topic they explore has waned. Madonna, Princess Di, and the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan affair have been given the cultural studies treatment; now comes Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster. Like the film itself,

ITALO CALVINO ONCE DESCRIBED his primary working method as “the subtraction of weight,” an idea that also animates the latest film from the forty-four-year-old French director Olivier Assayas. Late August, Early September, which opens in New York in early July, is a story about suffering and death, but one infused with an extraordinary degree of lightness and spontaneity, stemming in part from the film’s elliptical construction and loosely sketched characters. This effortless quality is the result of years of exploration on Assayas’s part. He studied painting and literature, then wrote film

BACK IN MY STUDENT DAYS I caught Jules and Jim practically every time it came around to a repertory house or college film society. I adored it, I knew it by heart, and I always walked out on a cloud, and so I wasn’t prepared, on seeing Francois Truffaut’s masterpiece several summers ago during a revival run at Film Forum, to be so blind-sided. For weeks the story of love derailed and friendship damaged wouldn’t leave me alone. I dreamed about it. I couldn’t get Georges Delerue’s tragic, lyrical music—in my book, the most perfect film score ever written—out of my head. And I puzzled over the

URINE PICTURESQUELY RUNNING DOWN a hit man’s socks into his wing-tip shoes, a systematic pillow girl servicing an army battalion on the Manchurian frontier, a cold-blooded killer getting aroused sniffing at a pot of rice, a frustrated student pounding a piano’s keys with his erect penis.

There’s no business like Japanese show business, at least as practiced by ’60s B-movie savant Seijun Suzuki. Favoring violent non sequiturs and theatrical artifice over narrative continuity and genre boundaries, he hit audiences with hot and cold blasts of displacement, playfully tactile uses of image and sound,

THE SEVENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Japanese director Shohei Imamura’s studies in aberrant humanity have been nothing if not singular. The Eel (1997) was undoubtedly the best film ever made about a man’s near-cosmic oneness with his pet fish, and Imamura’s latest, Dr. Akagi (which opened in mid-January in New York), is more accomplished still: It’s the winningest comedy of all time . . . about hepatitis. The title character (fervently played by Akira Emoto) is nicknamed “Dr. Liver” because he diagnoses disease of that organ in virtually every patient he treats. We first catch sight of the doctor in an