Dirty Work

What is honor? Blackhawk Down will tell you (without using the word) but in this movie it gets all mixed up with racial tolerance.

Hélas! The good-humored detachment and optimism that François Truffaut brought to the French cinema seems to have died with him. Barring the rare exception, like last year’s Un Air de Famille by Cédric Klappisch, each new French film that manages to get itself released in this country seems to try to outdo the last in…

Formerly, the American dream was being able to buy a house in the suburbs with a picket fence; now, perhaps, it is being able to live in a frat house like a college boy until retirement

People who are obsessed, as so many people are these days, with racial, ethnic, or sexual identity must lead very dull lives, for it is ridiculously easy to entertain them. In Whatever, for instance, I heard be-sandaled feminists burst into hoots of laughter when one woman told another that she wishes her scruffy-looking daughter would…

The title of the latest movie to come out of the Evil Empire is Disney’s “The Kid”, possibly because the filmmakers were afraid that people might confuse it with the Charlie Chaplin classic of 1921—though more likely because Disney’s appalling hubris just can’t bear not to have its loathsome name on everything it produces. The…

Enemy at the Gates, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, aspires to the Saving Private Ryan level of spectacle, but offers a bit more in the way of dramatic coherence. What a curious way it has, however, of representing for us the vast slaughterhouse of the Battle of Stalingrad—that is, as a solo duel between a Russian…