Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

There is a scene in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair in which the hero, a novelist called Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes), and his married lover, Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore), go to a movie based on one of one of Bendrix’s novels. As they sit in the smoke-filled fleapit, we…

The thesis of Elizabeth, written by Michael Hirst and directed by Shekhar Kapur, is very simple— like the people that the thesis is ultimately about. These are the credulous peasants of the middle ages who are supposed to have worshiped the Virgin Mary. By the 16th century, the Catholic Church as headed by Sir John…

One True Thing, directed by the excellent Carl Franklin (Devil in the Blue Dress and that Arkansas movie with Billy Bob Thornton) and based on the novel by Anna Quindlen, suffers from trying to do too much. It is really three separate stories that are like plants grown too close together, all fighting for the…

Trust Merchant-Ivory to find a way to transform the elegant and the sophisticated into the banal

An ambivalent portrait of Ralph Nader contains a lesson for us all

The Thin Red Line, adapted from James Jones’s novel of Guadalcanal by the “legendary” Terrence Malick, director of Badlands and Days of Heaven, represents an “historic” return to movies for its director after a 20 year layoff. It is a mess — a classic case of what happens when you work on something for too…