%1

Last night out

Spike Lee's desire to explore the nuances of black life is admirable, though the scope of his ambition has often proved to be his artistic undoing. Each film not only tells a racially charged story that (he hopes) teaches a moral lesson, but insists on driving home the points again and again in superfluous scenes that drag on and on (one of the reasons his films tend to run well over two hours). This is an especially distressing problem in Bamboozled, his 2000 film about a black television producer who brazenly puts on a minstrel show.

Keyword tags

Top ten films of ’02: Overlooked treasures

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” In Steven Daldry’s film The Hours, this opening line from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway connects three women in three stories. In the first, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is writing a novel about Clarissa Dalloway, who makes a decision to buy flowers for a dinner party she is giving that evening. In the second, set in the 1950s, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) begins reading the book. She identifies so closely with the troubled Mrs. Dalloway that she spends the day reading the story.