Because I Said So

Zero Effect is a wacky detective yarn written and directed by Jake Kasdan and starring Bill Pullman as Daryl Zero, an updated, Americanized version of Sherlock Holmes. Zero is a reclusive private detective who gives his cases names like “The Case of the Mismatched Shoelaces” and commands spectacularly high fees for his “highly intuitive” powers…

Live Flesh by Pedro Almodovar begins with a scene, set on a lonely night in 1970, in which a baby is born on a bus on the way to the hospital. There is a comic bus driver and a comic older woman helping the baby be born. “If idiots like us didn’t give birth,” she…

A Norwegian film whose amusing qualities are the spoonful of sugar that helps the message-medicine go down

What happens when anything can happen? Pretty much nothing. Or at least nothing that anyone needs to care about

Is it the cultural and linguistic divide between Anglo and Hispanic America which makes the humor in this movie so hard for me to find, or is it just an awful movie?

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…