Letters from Iwo Jima

What is it that has lately induced the makers of romantic movie comedies think of Jane Austen as the Everest of their ambition? Now we can add Bridget Jones’s Diary, directed by Sharon Maguire to the spate of Jane films in the last decade, since its self-conscious updating of Pride and Prejudice confirms its homage…

The End of Violence, directed by Wim Wenders and written by Nicholas Klein is a frequently enjoyable film in which, however, there is far too much going on, an excess of Germanic portentousness and a hackneyed narrative premiss involving a vast governmental conspiracy (ho-hum) against the people. On the symbolic level the film is about…

Rounders directed by John Dahl is wish-fulfilment fantasy of a different sort from that of Let’s Talk About Sex. This is the fantasy of cool, and it is paradoxical that the hottest new stars seem to compete to out-cool each other. Needless to say, this loving cultivation of image has little or nothing to do…

Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam represents yet another mile-marker in Mr Lee’s progress from interesting young filmmaker to boring commercial hack. He no longer seems to have anything to say except for the same kinds of things he says in interviews to get attention: Clarence Thomas ought to be beaten with a baseball bat, Charlton…

The Postman by Kevin Costner was made about 25 years too late. This is the kind of thing that would have seemed “deep,” or possibly “heavy” to the drugged-out hippies of the Vietnam era, but is just laughable now. Even the audience of film critics I saw it with laughed out loud at several of…