Amazing Grace

Santa would a-wooing go and naturally gets himself quite a present to unwrap on Christmas morning. Hollywood, as usual, brings us every adult’s Christmas fantasy.

The impulse behind this multicultural French film is a good one, but the translation makes it sound as if these French high school kids were trying, and failing, to talk in Ebonics

Bait, written by a committee (Andrew Scheinman, Adam Scheinman and Tony Gilroy) and directed by Antoine Fuqua, almost rises to the level of a decent movie, but of course it cannot resist (as what contemporary Hollywood movie can resist?) the temptation to over-egg the pudding. The central character is an appealing ne’er-do-well and petty thief…

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…

America may be a nation of greedy moral relativists, only waiting for a good opportunity to turn criminal, but it’s not so bad as France!

Despite having almost nothing to do with the novel by Alexandre Dumas from which it is supposedly adapted, The Man in the Iron Mask by Randall Wallace is not so bad as one might have expected it to be. Certainly it is a lot better than the ineffably silly Three Musketeers of a few years…