Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

An absorbing if not-very-happy study of happiness — and unhappiness — among the English middle classes

A movie that just goes to show you that the virtues of understatement can be overstated

Starship Troopers directed by Paul Verhoeven and based on the book by Robert Heinlein is a custom-made vehicle for the expression of what I take to be the Hollywood worldview. In the fanciful future utopia it conjures up for us, the fearsome tide of poor, dirty, low class, and superstitious people, with skins both swarthy…

Le Mépris, or Contempt, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, was directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1963, but has just been re-released in a newly refurbished print. Michel Piccoli stars as Paul, a Communist playwright being wooed by a dumb American millionaire called Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance) to re-write a script for a film…

Buddy by Caroline Thompson is the (more or less) true story of Gertrude Lintz (Rene Russo), a Brooklyn socialite of the 1920s and 30s and author of Animals Are My Hobby, who raised chimpanzees as if they were children with some interesting results and later tried the same trick with a gorilla (the eponymous Buddy,…

The iron rule in Hollywood is that if you’ve got a hit, you’ve got to have a sequel. But what happens when the hit depends, as last year’s Blair Witch Project did, on a necessarily temporary illusion of reality? Fool me once and I’ll give you a good review; fool me twice and I’m an…