Queen, The

Down to Earth, Chris Rock’s remake (directed by Chris and Paul Weitz) of Heaven Can Wait (1978)—itself a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)—is a disappointment. Though there are some very funny things in it, its glib message about being oneself turns out to be a cover for being self-indulgent, in the style (I’m…

Healing by Killing by Nitzam Aviram, an Israeli director, is a documentary which pretty persuasively establishes the case that it was the Nazi practice of euthanasia for victims of handicap, mental retardation and so forth which led to the holocaust. “Without the psychiatric death industry,” as one of Aviram’s interviewees puts it, “Auschwitz and Treblinka…

A heroic German dissident of the Second World War partially overcomes the recent antipathy of the movies towards religious heroes

Jackie Brown confirms two things we have always really known about Quentin Tarantino at his best (at his worst he is just unspeakable). One is that he is the most compulsively watchable filmmaker now working in America. He knows how to keep an audience riveted to the screen, and he knows how to tell a…

It used to be almost a cliché: the toughest teacher you had in high school was always the one you remembered as having given you the most, once you grew up and learned to appreciate it. Nowadays, however, we believe neither in growing up ourselves nor in expecting our kids to grow up. Our kids…

Martin Scorsese’s new movie, Bringing Out the Dead is yet further evidence of its director’s fascination with the manic personality as well as his undoubted skill with the camera. Unfortunately, those of us who do not share this fascination are likely to find one manic personality looking rather too much like another, and the would-be…