Is it time, after the anonymous disaster of Mission to Mars, to give Brian De Palma's famously doomed film of Tom Wolfe's bulky novel Bonfire of the Vanities another chance? The uproarious ins and outs of the film's troubled production have become well-known via Julie Salamon's account of its making, The Devil's Candy, and fans of that might want to flick between page and screen to see just when Melanie Griffith caused untold continuity problems by having her breasts inflated. Techno buffs will surely appreciate the pointless but somehow wonderful trickery of an extended tracking shot at the outset that exists only to last a few seconds longer than the one in Orson Welles Touch of Evil (1958). Tom Hanks was rather better cast than was generally allowed, as "master of the universe" Sherman McCoy, who comes a cropper after a hit-and-run accident, since his nice-guy act shows intriguing cracks. And even Bruce Willis does his best on a hiding to nothing as the drunken writer. It is funny in parts, agonising in others, and misses Wolfe's tone--but somehow its failures might make it as symptomatic of the long-gone excesses of the early 90s as the novel was of the 80s. --Kim Newman
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