Dirty Work

A deeply unfunny movie, apparently, to nobody but me.

Nobody could be in favor of Victorian hypocrisy anymore. So why do we continue to bash it — and congratulate ourselves for being superior?

Anastasia, made for Fox by the disaffected Disney animators Don Bluth and Gary Goldman was deeply depressing for me to watch—not because it is shoddy filmmaking but because there is so much obvious talent here employed in falsifying reality for no good reason. Of course it doesn’t do for one to be too much the…

Earlier this year, in a review of Panic by Henry Bromell, I observed that it was possible to appreciate a film which is an impressive bit of propaganda for a political position with which you profoundly disagree. Just think of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will. Nowadays, the most assiduous ideologues among film-makers are…

Here are the good things about The Legend of Bagger Vance, written by Jeremy Leven from the novel by Steven Pressfield and directed by Robert Redford. It tells a story set in Savannah, Georgia, in about 1930 and never once mentions Jim Crow or Southern white racism. So familiar by now is the iconography of…

Analyze This, directed by Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day), stars Robert DeNiro as Paul Vitti, a notorious New York mobster who suddenly finds he’s having panic attacks. He thinks they’re heart attacks. When the doctor tells him that they are in fact psychosomatic, he is incredulous: “Do I look like a guy who panics?” The doctor…