Dirty Work

One True Thing, directed by the excellent Carl Franklin (Devil in the Blue Dress and that Arkansas movie with Billy Bob Thornton) and based on the novel by Anna Quindlen, suffers from trying to do too much. It is really three separate stories that are like plants grown too close together, all fighting for the…

American Psycho is as a movie as it was as a book, not a serious work of art but merely something designed to be talked about in the media and thus to confer money and celebrity upon its now plural authors. This is important, because not all books or movies that are talked about in…

Derivative and way too heavily overstocked with morals, themes, narrative false starts and pathos, this movie is nevertheless not without its entertaining qualities

Divided We Fall by Jan Hrebejk, adapting a novel by Petr Jarchovsky is a very Czech film: charming, warm-hearted, funny, humane and philosophical—a velvet revolution sort of movie. Set before, during and just after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, its characters are all humble, flawed but decent folk coping as best they can with the…

Central Station, a Brazilian film directed by Walter Salles, stars the marvelous Fernanda Montenegro as Dora (real name, Isadora Teixera) a retired schoolteacher who makes her living by writing letters for illiterates who stream through the main train station in Rio de Janeiro. Many of the letters she simply throws away, knowing that the hopeless…

Citizen Ruth by Alexander Payne is not so good a movie as it ought to be, given its materials and the good idea of its conception (you should pardon the term). Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern) is a feckless dopehead living on the margins of lower middle class Omaha. The film begins with a scene of…