Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

Poor Meg Ryan can’t seem to find a decent role in which she is allowed to be a grown-up. Whose idea was it to try making her a boxing manager dressed like a hooker?

Its heart is in the right place, but the inspirational uplift looks just a bit artificial

The Girl on the Bridge (La Fille sur le Pont), written by Serge Frydman and directed by Patrice Leconte, I take to be a sort of parable or allegory of married love. In order to accentuate its rather spooky and tangential relation to reality, it is shot in black and white and makes use of…

Welcome to Sarajevo, directed by Michael Winterbottom and written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, is based on the true story told in the book Natasha’s Story by the British television journalist Michael Nicholson. The movie fictionalizes it, calling the journalist Henderson (Stephen Dillane) and the little Bosnian girl he rescues from the carnage of 1992-3 and…

Small Time Crooks has, like all Woody Allen’s films some excellent jokes. The best of them, however, are stupid-jokes (very popular in Hollywood lately) which, it always seems to me, is the comedic equivalent of dynamiting fish. It used to be drunks, now it’s idiots. Woody Allen himself plays Ray Winkler, a petty thief whose…

Gross-out comedies are now as much a tradition of the summer movie season as the special-effects blockbusters — and sometimes the two are hard to tell one from another. Scary Movie, which shot to the top of the list of box office grosses (if you’ll pardon the expression) in the week after it opened, purports…