Because I Said So

A lovely film from the author of Gomorrah that explores, with humor but little hope, the God-shaped hole in the life of our culture

Twice Upon a Yesterday, whose British title was The Man With Rain in His Shoes, was directed by Maria Ripoll as a pretty transparent imitation of Sliding Doors but without very much of that film’s wit or stylishness. I have nothing in principle against this kind of metaphysical fable and think of its great exemplar,…

It’s not, unfortunately, The Last Days of Disco, but 54, written and directed by Mark Christopher, covers some of the same ground. Mike Meyers with a nose job stars as Steve Rubell, the legendary club-owner, and Ryan Phillipe is the starry-eyed boy, Shane O’Shea, from New Jersey who comes to the city to make it…

There are just enough good things about Cast Away by Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Contact, What Lies Beneath) to make it worth seeing. These are as follows: (1) what is perhaps the most thrilling and frightening representation of a plane crash on film; (2) magnificent photography of the South Seas and the island where Tom…

The good news about Go, written by John August and directed by Douglas Liman (Swingers) is that it is the best of the scores of imitations of Quentin Tarantino that have appeared since Pulp Fiction set the standard for hip postmodernism at the movies in 1994. It is therefore the hippest movie you can see…

The Center of the World, directed by Wayne Wang from a script written by Mr Wang and others under the pseudonym of Ellen Benjamin Wong, is a sort of parable—an attempt to be honest about the relations between men and women by portraying a very odd relationship indeed. A computer nerd called Richard (Peter Sarsgaard)…