Amazing Grace

Little Voice written and directed by Mark Herman from a stage-play by Jim Cartwright is a wonderful movie with an absolutely knockout performance by the eponymous Little Voice or LV (Jane Horrocks) up until its climax. After that, it simply doesn’t know what to do with the situation it has created and peters out in…

A sharply-observed and powerful tragi-comedy set in the streets of Beijing is at least the equal of its Italian neo-realist model.

I was, as my long-time readers may remember, inclined to give Leaving Las Vegas the benefit of a very considerable doubt that it was not, as it seemed to be, about insane self-indulgence but, like Kiss or Kill, about the intersection of love and trust. One Night Stand, the latest from that film’s director, Mike…

M:I-2, directed by John Woo and written by Robert Towne, is like the original Mission Impossible (1996) in being a postmodern-style romance of technology. The earlier film, which was directed by Brian de Palma, did for the deus ex machina what Shakespeare did for the Aristotelian unities, which is to say that it blew the…

Come to think of it, the capacity of Scott’s “minist’ring angel” to be beastly to her menfolk and even more beastly to other women has always been comic.

Le Huitième Jour(The Eighth Day) by Jaco Van Dormael begins with a somewhat whimsical attempt to portray the world as seen through the eyes of Georges (Pascal Duquenne), a Downs syndrome sufferer. Like Genesis (the pop group of the same name makes an appearance later in the film), it begins “In the beginning. . .”…