Queen, The

Whatever It Takes, directed by David Raynr and written by Mark Schwahn is yet another in the seemingly endless stream of movies which attempt to translate classic literature into American High School stories. This fad began in 1995 with what is still the best of its kind, Amy Heckerling’s adaptation of Emma, by Jane Austen,…

The Object of My Affection, directed by Nicholas Hytner from a screenplay by Wendy Wasserstein, strives briefly to rise above the level of moral imbecility we have come to expect from most Hollywood comedies these days, but alas does not succeed. The idea is that Nina Borowski (Jennifer Aniston), a young social worker in New…

Mira Nair (I arm Iran?) takes an English classic and de-Orientalizes it, so leaving very little for non-ideologues to enjoy

The Girl on the Bridge (La Fille sur le Pont), written by Serge Frydman and directed by Patrice Leconte, I take to be a sort of parable or allegory of married love. In order to accentuate its rather spooky and tangential relation to reality, it is shot in black and white and makes use of…

Britain may be the only country in the world where it is still possible to make movies which glorify and romanticize and sentimentalize an old-fashioned view of masculinity—and have it come off looking progressive. Last spring we had Brassed Off which traded off its romantic notions of a stag-line of Yorkshire coal-miners down t’pit or…

A genuinely moving story of a mother in search of her lost child which, nevertheless, suffers from an all-too familiar sort of self-righteousness