Amazing Grace

The first crime of Father Amaro, it seems, was in his ever allowing himself to get mixed up with that gang of mobsters known as the Roman Catholic Church

Nettoyage à Sec (Dry Cleaning) by Anne Fontaine presents us with a French version of that now familiar Hollywood trope, merely gestured towards in 8mm, the capacity for sexual adventurism and even perversion in all of us. Nicole (Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie (Charles Berling) have been married for 15 years and run a dry-cleaning establishment in…

Conspiracy Theory, written by Brian Helgeland and directed by Richard Donner, attempts to do for lunatics what movies like The Shawshank Redemption tried to do for convicts—that is to sanitize them and make them lovable victims of government and society instead of dangerous social malcontents. Charming, blue-eyed Mel Gibson plays Jerry, a middle aged New…

Iris Murdoch? Oh, yeah. She was that writer who got Alzheimer’s, wasn’t she?

One thing you can say for One Night at McCool’s, directed by Harald Zwart and written by Stan Seidel, is that it is funny. Not subtle or meaningful or profound or even interesting but funny. Maybe that’s enough to make it worth seeing. The trouble is that, in the intervals of trying and (mostly) succeeding…

A clever headline to the New York Times review of Charlie’s Angels read “Sleek, Tough, Frosted? Must Be Empowerment.” The irony is meant to be a gentle one, as is that of the film itself, which in true postmodern style tries to make a virtue out the patent preposterousness of the kick-fighting, acrobatic babes of…