Heartbreakers (2001): review: 1/10

A mother-daughter team find rich men to marry and then divorce, thus makng a good living.

A real stinker of a film featuring:

1. a charmless performance from Weaver, who adopts a very unfunny Russian accent for much of the film.

2. a dull and obvious performance from Hackman

3. lifeless dialogue

4. very unattractive characters

5. a meandering plotline whcih completely fails to intreague, having a "make it up as we go along" quality.

It is also considerably overlong, and invites very unflattering comparasions with "Some Like it Hot".

Postcards from the Edge (1990): review - 2/10

A cocaine-snorting actress is given a role on a film on condition that she lives with her alchoholic and domineering mother, who is also given to melodrama and self-pity.

There are far too few good jokes and cameo performances in this film to relieve the irritatingness of the main charaters- who are extremely shallow- and it drags on and on, rudderless, displaying that self-indulgence that often afflicts films about actors or film-making.

Eureka (1984): review- 1/10

A prospector strikes it rich in Alaska, then builds a mansion in the Carribean where he lives with his unpleasant family, and is approached by speculators wishing to develop his island.

A dogs' breakfast of a film, boring and absurd (it even has a mystical element!), illustrating in its failure the tenet guiding all good pictures: concision and clarity are virtues in art.

Mississippi Burning (1988): review- 8/10

Two FBI cops investigate murders in Mississippi: the superior is ascetic and fully committed to the civil rights project, while his accomplice, played by Hackman, is morally ambiguous and scepetical.

The film works through, with little subtlety, the imposition of Federal Law in a small southern town.

The relationship between Hackman and his accomplice- which could be illuminating about the attitudes of southerners who grudgingly accepted racial segregation- is not as enlightening as it might be. Equally, the black characters operate, as do the KKK policemen who oppress them- as caricatures.

Nonetheless, the film is extremely entertaining.

The French Connection (1971): review- 9/10

*

"That stuff is in that car"

Two narcotics police pursue a French based drug gang in New York and Washington. The film provides provides a magnificent tour of the seamier neighbourhoods of New York, in beautiful fleeting images. There are fine performances from Hackman as the downbeaten cop and from those he encounters: the scenes are often shot through with a certain Chandleresque wit.