Because I Said So

A Brazilian revenge-drama is too portentous and fraught with religious significance for all but the most militant of atheists to appreciate

The joke that gives As Good As It Gets its title is the best thing in the picture. Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), a successful novelist, suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder which manifests itself in an insane punctiliousness about rituals, not stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, excessive hand-washing and the like. When his routine is disrupted…

Michael Almereyda’s extremely hip film version of Hamlet could have given us a cogent reading of the play, if not necessarily exactly what it deserves. Some important critics, starting from the undoubted fact that Hamlet is a difficult and sometimes nasty character, a royal pain in the Elsinore, have gone on to conclude that the…

The Celebration is a film directed and co-written by Thomas Vinterberg, a Danish director who has teamed up with Lars Von Trier, a fellow Dane, to issue a manifesto called Dogma 95. Everybody, including Mr Vinterberg himself, seems to agree that this is little more than a publicity stunt, and Vinterberg claims that in the…

Another cinematic exercise in drinking deep from the intoxicating stream of popular paranoia