Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

You should be ashamed to be watching this movie. I know I was.

Yet another moral tale to illustrate how much is to be deplored by all right-thinking people the “cycle of violence”

Readers may remember my reservations about the all-but universally praised L.A. Confidential a few months ago — a film which I note continues to garner award after award from less fastidious critics. Yet, thought I, what was the point of a movie in which everybody but a couple of utterly self-absorbed heroes is basically scum?…

Hollywood producers have always been a prey to the delusion that what makes great novels great are their stories, or their characters or their “ideas”—things whose transfer to celluloid is fairly straightforward. But as Stéphane Mallarmé once said of poems, novels are not made of ideas but of words. Without Dickens’s words, Great Expectations is…

The Dinner Game, as the untranslatable Dîner de Cons is awkwardly but decorously rendered, is an uproarious French farce by Francis Veber, co-author of La Cage Aux Folles and creator on his own of a number of other plays and films in a similar style. It tells the story of Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte), a…

Children of Heaven by the Iranian director, Majid Majidi is a little gem of a film of the sort which the Iranians seem to be good at, though it is a very little gem. When nine year old Ali Mandegar (Mir Farrokh Hashemian) takes the only pair of shoes belonging to his younger sister, Zahra (Bahare…