Dirty Work

Bounce, written and directed by Don Roos is a high concept movie. A playboy advertising executive called Buddy Amaral (Ben Affleck) gets lucky with a stunning blonde called Mimi (Natasha Henstridge) as they wait to catch the last flights out of snowbound O’Hare International in Chicago. In order to spend the night with Mimi, Buddy…

Near the end of Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro), Marcel Camus’s masterpiece of 1959, there comes what can only be described as an authorial disclaimer that strikes the film’s one seriously false note. “The happiness of the poor is the great illusion of Carnival,” we are told, more or less out of the blue. Up until…

[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 19, 2012] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Maybe I’m growing tired and jaded from seeing large numbers of mediocre movies, but more and more I find that the best I can say of a romantic comedy is that it’s not so bad as I expected it to be. This is certainly true of Someone Like You, primary responsibility for which belongs to…

Comic gangsters reassure us that, even in the most civilized of countries, civilization is for suckers.

The Franco-German director Dominik Moll’s new film is called Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Veut du Bien, which means, “Harry, a friend who only wants the best for you.” For its American release it has been given the slightly misleading English title of With A Friend Like Harry. . ., but in other English-speaking countries…