Uncle Orson Reviews 1996 • Uncle Orson Reviews 1996 Favorite Books • Contemporary Issues • Mysteries • History and Culture • Books for Writers Magazine Subscriptions • Magazines that make it a good mail day • On the Downside • Comic Strips Television Picks and Pukes • Favorite Comedies • Favorite Dramas • Favorite Miniseries • Favorite Talk Shows • Favorite Cable Channels • Shows Which Are Much Better Than I Ever Expected • Shows That Are Probably As Good As Ever But I Just Don't Care Anymore • Shows I Once Liked Which Are Hurtling Toward Well-Deserved Death Movies • Regrets and Disappointment • Favorites of the Year • Acting Awards

Best Movie

Twelve Monkeys

Genuinely inventive, powerfully acted, an unforgettable, see-often film, with some of the best performances of several actors' careers.

Ransom

Two intertwining sets of character relationships, all interesting and brilliantly performed, plus writing as sharp as in The Fugitive with the most fascinating, layered, and believable villain I've seen in films of this sort. Makes Malkovich's character in In the Line of Fire and Hopper's in Speed look like the cartoons they were.

All of these are much better written than they're usually given credit for (do you think this stuff is easy to do? Try writing one as good)

First Contact

Independence Day

Twister

The Rock (if only for the unforgettable scene between Ed Harris and Michael Biehn)

Extreme Measures (it raised interesting ethical issues and didn't settle for easy answers; the formula was thin but the movie didn't make us dumber)

One Fine Day

Good writing of sharp but believable dialogue; decently written children; they don't have sex which makes the romance more, not less, piquant; Michelle Pfeiffer remains the most natural of the star actresses working today; and George Clooney bids to be, not the new Cary Grant, which his looks might have suggested, but the new Jimmy Stewart, which is a Hollywood role that was going begging

Jerry Maguire (a too-glibly written but very well acted and directed exploration of a man's growing up. Tom Cruise is serious about doing Good as well as good movies, but Renee Zellweger stole it out from under him)

The Preacher's Wife

Michael

Spitfire Grill

As with all melodrama, you have to be willing to give yourself to it emotionally; if you were, you got your hanky's worth. My kind of movie: a story about good people doing good.

Melodrama is usually done on TV now, and there aren't many good ones.

Dead Man Walking

The way this film was cast, it was obviously intended to be very slanted against the death penalty and unkind to those who support it. But in the process of filming, perhaps because of the author's influence, perhaps because of the innate honesty of the filmmakers, this movie became compassionate toward everybody, and also ruthlessly honest with everybody, and it should stand as one of the great films of all time.

A Time to Kill

(not perfect, but a good effort with much that was right about it. When the hero is tempted to sleep with his hotshot legal assistant, a member of the audience in Greensboro called out, "Don't you touch her! You got a good wife!" She was answered with applause. And people say the audiences don't care about morality!)

Fargo

The way some critics talk, you'd think art films were the only ones that ought to exist. Wrong ... but they are certainly among the kinds of films that should exist, and Fargo, with its black comedy and bitter honesty, is as good a film as I've seen this year. Not powerful or moving, but ... it earns that moment of epiphany.

The Big Night

(it may succumb to the cliche of having an affair with the enemy's wife, and the resolution feels emotionally trivial after so much build-up, but this film earns the brilliantly pretentious dinner scene, which is one of the great moments in film this year. And the acting is universally splendid.)

That Thing You Do

Not screamingly funny, it's a comedy in the pure sense of the word — a happy story, filled with light.

Harriet the Spy.

There were other promising movies — Beautiful Girls, My Fellow Americans — but the flaws were deep and wide, and I can't actually call them "good."

Sense and Sensibility

A wonderful treatment of Jane Austen's lightest novel. But last year's Persuasion was a better movie, and the miniseries Pride and Prejudice was the truest adaptation.

Emma

(but, alas, it was only good insofar as it was faithful to Austen's most morally complex novel. The hamhanded direction blew several key scenes, most notably the picnic, which was so woefully misinterpreted that it should win an award for spectacular directorial boneheadedness. Either the director thought he was filming for idiots, or he never heard of subtlety and didn't realize it was one of the hallmarks of Jane Austen's social satire.)