Letters from Iwo Jima

Rushmore, directed by Wes Anderson is a wonderfully strange movie whose strangeness is what makes it worth seeing. Its main character is Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a precocious 15-year old student at a posh prep-school called Rushmore Academy. He is there on scholarship as his father, wonderfully played by Seymour Cassel is a barber who…

A form of pathography in which the audience is kept at arm’s length from the hero/heroine by the compassion he/she demands of it

Payback is directed by Brian Helgeland, who was one of the writers involved in L.A. Confidential, and, like that film, this one is an exercise in ersatz film noir. It is not exactly a remake of John Boorman’s Point Blank of 1967, but both are based on the same novel, The Hunter, which was written…

Velvet Goldmine, written and directed by Todd Haynes, comes with the following “Director’s Statement” Velvet Goldmine is a valentine to the sounds and images that erupted in and around London in the early 1970’s: to Brian Ferry, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed — and the extraordinary inversions they imposed on our notions of the…

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,…

As Enchanted April showed a few years ago, Italy is the promised land for the cold, sexually-repressed, work- obsessed Englishman or, more likely, Englishwoman. At least it is for the English who imagine themselves as having been kitted out by their climate or their religion or their national character with such a load of what…