Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

Michael Sragow, writing in salon.com, says that Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s lovely little film, Mifune, “outlines the emptiness of upward mobility in an age of unapologetic capitalism.” It is one of those observations that tell you far more about the critic than they do about the film, which is not at all about “capitalism,” unapologetic or otherwise,…

A good-hearted Australian movie that just about rises to the level of being worth watching

Love is the Devil written and directed by John Maybury, stars Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon, the pioneer of the skull-beneath-the-skin school of British art. Because he was forbidden by keepers of the Bacon artistic estate to show actual Bacon canvases on screen, Maybury, who is himself a painter, has had to confine himself to…

A sharp satire of popular romanticism occasionally spills over into mere superciliousness.

Nurse Betty, the new film by Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors), is wonderfully enjoyable all the way through until its last ten minutes when suddenly the wild and thrilling ride it has offered us comes to a dead end. The story concerns Betty (Renée Zellweger), a small-town waitress from…

Billed as a “psychological thriller,” this movie apparently thinks sticking in not one but two psychos means that anything can happen without being dramatically accounted for