Letters from Iwo Jima

Lawn Dogs directed by John Duigan from a screenplay by Naomi Wallace is the worst movie I have seen since Fried Green Tomatoes. It touches reality at no point. Next to this piece of cinematic offal, Godzilla or Deep Impact look like kitchen sink realism. I don’t mind the mindlessness of such popcorn movies. They…

John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes makes the typical mistake of movies that attempt to satirize the celebrity-obsessed media culture of which, inevitably, they themselves are a part. In fact, so reliably do movies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers or Costa Gavras’s Mad City get it wrong that the suspicious-minded might be tempted to think that…

It’s too bad that the people in Dwight Little’s Murder at 1600 don’t know, postmodern style, that they are in a movie. It would have saved them an awful lot of trouble spent working out who it was that killed the attractive blonde in the White House one rainy night. Of course everybody’s first answer…

Wide Awake, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, must have attracted its stars — Denis Leary, Dana Delaney and Rosie O’Donnell, all of whom are badly miscast — because it tells what purports to be a heartwarming story of a kid in Catholic school, presumably of Irish extraction, who has to come to terms with his…

The General, written and directed by John Boorman, stars Brendan Gleeson as Martin Cahill, a real-life if legendary Irish outlaw who was assassinated by the IRA in 1994. The film, shot in black and white, begins with the assassination, ordered because Cahill had sold some stolen paintings to the Protestant paramilitaries of the UVF. “They…

It is with some reluctance that I add my voice to the chorus of praise that has greeted Chicken Run, the latest from Nick Park’s and Peter Lord’s Aardman animation shop (now operating under the aegis of DreamWorks). It would have been more satisfying to think of this film as I had grown used to…