Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

Let me get this straight. We’re supposed to sympathize with this guy for wanting to blow himself up along with a bunch of people he doesn’t even know?

An often-moving fictional account of a real event in World War I suffers from the same fault it criticizes in those who led their countries into war

Ma Vie en Rose by Alain Berliner manages to be a charming film, rather in the manner of the upbeat and jokey postmodernism of Berliner’s fellow Belgian, Jaco Van Dormael. Enjoyable as it is in many ways, however, one can never quite lose the sense of being got at by—that rare thing—a perfectly amiable propagandist…

Mira Sorvino is the only triumphant thing about this inept adaptation of a Marivaux play.

Senseless, directed by Penelope Spheeris, is a gross-out comedy of the school of Eddie Murphy’s Absent Minded Professor, designed to appeal to upwardly mobile blacks. Marlon Wayans stars as Darryl Whitherspoon, a student working several jobs in order to pay his way through college while at the same time sending money home to his single…

“She was too good for this life. . .” wrote Philip Larkin of the graffiti-covered bathing beauty on the advertising poster for “Sunny Prestatyn” and his ironic pity came to mind as I watched Gillian Anderson piling up the pathos as Lily Bart in Terence Davies’s screen adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of…