Letters from Iwo Jima

The Emperor and the Assassin by Chen Kaige presents us with an interesting and reasonably honest look at the way power is (or at least was) wielded in the world—as perhaps only a Chinese Communist who denounced his parents to the Red Guards of Mao’s Cultural Revolution could do. True, the action takes place over…

Seven Years in Tibet from Tri-Star, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, stars the egregious Brad Pitt as Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountain climber in the Himalayas who is interned by the British in India as an enemy alien at the outbreak of the Second World War. He and his fellow Teuton climber, Peter Aufschnaiter (David Thewlis)…

Lars von Trier, clowning around in his own inimitable fashion with the End of the World

I wouldn’t want it to be thought that I was piling on. Anyone who might otherwise have been tempted to see Battlefield Earth will need no discouragement from me to make him think better of the idea. I don’t know if I would go quite so far as the critic who called it “the worst…

Diane Lane has cornered the market in respectable middle-aged women suddenly awakened to erotic life by younger men — so why are her personae not remotely believable?

A movie about the war in Iraq and the men who fight it whose superiority to the other movies about the war is mostly owing to how bad they are