Queen, The

Dancing at Lughnasa, written by Frank McGuinness from play by Brian Friel and directed by Pat O’Connor, stars Marvelous Meryl Streep doing a vowel-perfect Irish accent as Kate Mundy, a severe old maid and schoolmistress who is trying to hold together her little family in Ireland in the 1930s. The family consists of her four…

An unforgettable docu-drama about a climbing accident in the Andes nearly 20 years ago which is still being talked about among mountaineers

The People vs. Larry Flynt is one of Hollywood’s more typical propaganda films—which is to say one which makes it too easy on itself. Unlike, say, Dead Man Walking, which was a very untypical propaganda film, it does not play straight with us. It stacks the deck in favor of its hero, Larry Flynt (Woody…

Like other sorts of horror movies, The Stepford Wives, has now gone postmodern and ironic, for who today is terrified of being forced to be a housewife?

Nights of Cabiria by Federico Fellini, recently re-released in a restored version, stars the great director’s wife, Giulietta Massina as the Roman prostitute, Cabiria, whose fortunes and misfortunes in the mid-1950s, must now seem to us to come from a world as long gone as Dante’s or Manzoni’s. All is now changed, changed utterly, since…

Mystery, Alaska, directed by Jay Roach, aspires to be the Rocky of hockey. A small-town hockey team from Alaska (surely they must mean Canada?) takes on the mighty New York Rangers on the neighborhood ice and, against all expectations, goes the distance with them. If you get a lump in your throat when Rocky staggers…