Dirty Work

Hard Eight is a brilliant little film by Paul Thomas Anderson, who also wrote the screenplay. It is a retelling (sort of) of Shakespeare’s Tempest set in the seedy but ever-atmospheric world of Nevada gambling dens. It begins with a castaway called John (John C. Reilly), washed up outside “Jack’s Coffee Shop” somewhere along a…

A touching and well-made movie from India whose motto, worthy of emulation by Hollywood, is "less is more"

A great film and a heartening demonstration that romance on the grand scale, as Hollywood used to do it, is still possible

Thieves by André Téchiné, is one of those films where the artistic means completely overpower the narrative ends. Here we have multiple narrators, shifts backward and forward in time, several brooding, complex, mysterious characters and a tangle of unexplained plot details trailing off into philosophical conversations full of gnomic utterance. And all for what? To…

Pink Flamingos by John Waters (1972), now re-released, is not a film which it is really possible to review. It contains sex scenes, both homo and heterosexual, weird perversions, bestiality, coprophagy, incest, madness, murder, torture, mutilation, rape, kidnapping, cannibalism, and the sale of human babies — and to all of this it invites and (in…

A heart-warming tale of exile and loss and reconciliation