Amazing Grace

Besieged, like so many other films by its director, Bernardo Bertolucci, is dramatically simple and visually complex. More than any other director working today, Bertolucci is a story-teller in pictures, which makes for striking and memorable images that are forever bursting out of their contexts and becoming saucily incoherent, at least in any kind of…

SLC Punk is another teen movie, but one with a serious purpose that is not lost sight of in the first five minutes. Obviously based on the personal experience of the writer-director James Merendino, it presents us with the inherently comic picture of a post-high school punk rocker, called Stevo (Matthew Lillard), and the not…

Jesus’ Son [sic] adapted from a stories by Denis Johnson and directed by Alison Maclean represents a revivification of a kind of pretentiousness that had its heyday in the 1960s and was associated with that era’s conceit that hippies, drug-users and drop-outs of all descriptions were a higher order of spiritual being—more like Jesus himself,…

The Spanish Prisoner, written and directed by David Mamet, gives expression to a refined kind of paranoia born of what we might call sophistication-anxiety. This results in the common assumption among contemporary writers, artists and (especially) filmmakers — see, for example, the recent movies Wild Things and L.A. Confidential — that everything must be different…

Is it possible to make a movie about reality TV that’s more cheesy than reality TV? Amazingly enough, it is.

A Norwegian film whose amusing qualities are the spoonful of sugar that helps the message-medicine go down