Letters from Iwo Jima

It’s a lucky thing for me that Whit Stillman, who is an old friend of the American Spectator, makes such good movies. If he made bad ones, I should have to be diplomatic, but that is a necessity which has yet to arise. I thought his first film, Metropolitan (1990) was funny, clever and charming….

A Chef in Love (or, to give it its French title, Le Mille et Un Recettes d’un Cuisinier Amoureux) by Nana Djordjadze is a Franco-Georgian film which takes the fast-track to success by foreign language films: include lots of food. Set in the Caucasus in 1920, it is the story of a French chef, Pascal…

. . .And speaking of witless sequels, Batman and Robin directed by Joel Schumacher is a pathetic document—un-clever and un-funny. And being un-clever and un-funny are the two cardinal sins for any such obvious attempt at postmodern filmmaking as a Batman sequel. Given that we’ve got to watch this kind of garbage (since Hollywood hardly…

Time passes and the world moves on, but Hollywood is still making the same basic thriller — in which American government and industry are the bad guys — that it has churned out for 30 years

An epic tale of an outcast Vietnamese boy’s quest to find his American father

You knew that Mulan, the latest extrusion from the Satanic Mills of the Disney animation shop, had reached its intended audience when you saw the headline of Janet Maslin’s review in the New York Times: “A Warrior, She Takes on Huns and Stereotypes.” Someone ought to do a study on what it is that makes…