Amazing Grace

Kenneth Branagh’s new film of Love’s Labour’s Lost has very little to do with the play of the same name by William Shakespeare. Branagh’s marketability (such as it is) has always been pretty closely tied to that of the 16th century playwright, but here he is shamelessly using the Shakespeare brand name simply in order…

They don’t come much more charming than Shower, a Chinese film by Zhang Yang with a delicacy and a poignancy in its humor that is almost French. Its theme is a compelling one too, depicting in comic yet poignant form the clash between the new economy in post- Mao, post-Deng China and the old ways…

Jackie Brown confirms two things we have always really known about Quentin Tarantino at his best (at his worst he is just unspeakable). One is that he is the most compulsively watchable filmmaker now working in America. He knows how to keep an audience riveted to the screen, and he knows how to tell a…

Like the unsuccessfully arty Deceiver, the unashamedly popular Desperate Measures by Barbet Schroeder is a film which begins by telling us the IQ—“over 150”—of its criminal protagonist, Peter McCabe (Michael Keaton). Oh dear. Once again we are in the presence of one of those criminal geniuses who are so seldom to be met with in…

Speed 2: Cruise Control by Jan De Bont is even more mindless than the first Speed and is perhaps postmodern filmmaking at its most cynical and exploitative. That is to say, there is hardly any attempt to put together a coherent drama which would help us to make some sense of the relentless series of…

Still Crazy, directed by Brian Gibson from a script by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, also the writers of The Commitments, does about as good a job as it is possible to do with such predictable material as the reunion twenty years later of an aging 70s pop group. The recent Velvet Goldmine dealt…