Phil Joanou’s stylish psychological thriller Final Analysis takes these combustible elements and stirs slowly but expertly until they explode in murder, trial scenes, double, triple and quadruple crosses. Hollywood has not had much luck of late trying to refurbish the Hitchcockian legacy, but Joanou’s deliberately retro thriller-lusciously designed by Dean Tavoularis and photographed in rich, burnished images by Jordan Cronenweth - is an honorable homage, mounted with such seductive flair that you may be willing to ride with it all the way through its wild and frankly woolly third act, when Wesley Strick’s screenplay requires a major suspension of disbelief. Hold your second thoughts for the morning, and revel in Basinger’s delicious femme fatale turn, Roberts’s expertly creepy villainy, Paul Guilfoyle’s scenestealing savvy as Gere’s lawyer-friend and Joanou’s high-tension finesse. “Final Analysis” is gold-plated pulp.
Mira Nair, whose first film was “Salaam Bombay!”, has discovered a fresh and resonant subject for her second film, Missippi Masala. This lively, serious comedy examines the cultural collision between a family of Indian exiles, thrown out of Uganda when Idi Amin came to power, and the black community of Greenwood, Miss., where the exiles have settled. The family is one of several who run, and live in, local motels and exist in superficial harmony with their black neighbors until an interracial romance challenges the innate clannishness of both communities. Denzel Washington plays Demetrius, a carpet cleaner, and Sarita Choudhury is Mina, the Americanized daughter of an exiled lawyer (Rosan Seth) obsessed with reclaiming his confiscated Ugandan home. They are the smashingly sensual Romeo and Juliet of Nair’s tale, whose lives are deracinated when their secret affair is discovered. Sooni Taraporevala’s witty screenplay has a few bumpy, melodramatic patches, but they are easy to overlook in the face of the movie’s affectionate satirical spirit, which tweaks the hypocrisies of both communities without creating any overt villains. Nair and her big, wonderful cast - including Charles S. Dutton as Demetrius’s partner, Sharmila Tagore as the mother who runs a liquor store and the droll Ranjit Chowdhry as the hotel’s newlywed owner - create a small-town Southern world we haven’t seen on screen before, as evocative as the pungent mix of African, Indian and blues music on the soundtrack. This smart, appealing movie about displaced people and severed memories is firmly rooted in Nair’s generous appreciation of her all too human characters.
