Amazing Grace

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…

In Les Misérables, directed by Bille August, it is the film itself which turns out to be misérable: thin and poor and wretched and in need of feeding up. The one thing you don’t want to skimp on when you are filming an epic is the epic proportions. August, a fine director of intense and…

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…

A very slow-moving, atmospheric appreciation of the 19^th century outlaw — or at least of his celebrity, which it seems a shame his assassin did not inherit

The same trick which made Open Your Eyes a rather clever movie is also tried, in a somewhat cruder form, in The Thirteenth Floor, directed by Josef Rusnak. Unfortunately, in both cases the critic must refrain from revealing the trick, lest he spoil your enjoyment, though without revealing it the critic is almost completely unable…

A feeble parody of the old-time Hollywood musical that appears to have wowed critics not in spite of but because of all the ways it falls short of its original