Letters from Iwo Jima

Kama Sutra by Mira Nair (co-written by Ms Nair and Helena Kriel) stars Indira Varma as Maya and Sarita Choudhury as Tara, two childhood friends in 16th century India who become deadly rivals in love in adulthood. It is an Indian version of the English bodice ripper style of historical romance and altogether tedious in…

A good-hearted Australian movie that just about rises to the level of being worth watching

A Friend of the Deceased (Un Ami du Défunt), a Franco-Ukrainian film directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich and written—in Russian—by Andrei Kourkov, has a very attractive premiss. Tolia (Alexandre Lazarev), a translator living in Kiev and living a hand-to-mouth, hustling sort of existence not untypical of life in the former Soviet Union, finds that his rather…

A disappointing attempt to plumb the human depths of a man too shallow to have any

The idea of a ghost who comes back from the dead to haunt his murderer is probably as old as murder itself and is familiar to us from the famous scene in Macbeth where Banquo’s ghost appears at the feast. But the idea of a ghost who appears not as a decorous classical shade, a…

Firelight, written and directed by William Nicholson (Shadowlands, Nell), is a contemporary chick-flick, one of those costume drama romances that attempts to marry traditional girlish fantasies to a mild strain of feminism so as to make its mainly female consumers feel comfortable, even virtuous, about watching what would otherwise be embarrassingly retrograde material. A poor…