Chris Columbus

Chris Columbus's work is read as a trajectory in Andy Richards's piece. Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire were energetic, irreverent farces carrying a certain cynicism about the workings of the conventional family, and they were drawn to domestic dysfunction. The two works that followed, one directed and one produced, offered disconcertingly conservative views of parenthood. Stepmom, the piece holds, shifts the emphasis from fathers to mothers and pushes his fondness for clowning into the background. Mike Higgins is harder on him writing about Bicentennial Man: Columbus ignores the long cinematic heritage of the mechanical man almost deliberately.