Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

There is often a satirical edge to Mike Myers’s comic speciality, which is characters who are trying and mostly failing to be cool. At some level, he understands the foolishness and moral poverty of the “cool” ideal and loves to laugh at those whose self-presentation falls pathetically short of their own self-image. But there is…

I went out of curiosity to the interesting documentary double billing of Chile, Obstinate Memory and The Battle of Chile Part Two: The Coup d’Etat by Patricio Guzman. The second was the 90-minute central episode extracted from Guzman’s three-part Marxist epic of 1978 and shown first; the first, shown second, was the hour long postscript…

One of the great films of the last half century keeps being re-made, each time more memorably and more resonantly than the last

Based on real people and real events which took place in 1994, The Straight Story, directed by David Lynch and written by John Roach and Mary Sweeney, is bad in the way that the old Disney movies were bad instead of being bad in the way that the new Disney movies are bad — which…

Next Stop, Wonderland, written and directed by Brad Anderson, is a charming romantic comedy with a great many funny moments, though it doesn’t quite pull everything together in its rather unsatisfactory ending. But it has an excellent beginning. Erin (Hope Davis) comes home one day to find her live-in boyfriend, Sean (Phil Hoffman), moving out…

The Apple was directed by a 17 year old girl, Samira Makhmalbaf, the daughter of the Iranian filmmaker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Gabbeh). It tells the true story of twin 12 year old girls, Massoumeh and Zahra Naderi, who were locked up behind iron bars by their father for their entire lives until the neighbors complained and…