Springfield Rifle

The English version of the title of Amores Perros, written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is given by its distributors as Love is a Bitch, though this seems to be something of an unhappy compromise, suggesting one of those assembly-line romantic comedies cranked out by Hollywood to exploit the fame of…

A rather splendidly repellant film about a rather extreme case of sex addiction

An inspiring account of a coach’s dedication and a high school football team’s success which rather underplays its chief insight into the importance of character

In Ride With the Devil, the great Taiwanese director Ang Lee shows once again that he has a kind of genius for the old Hollywood trick of adapting second-rank fiction to the big screen. This is not meant to be a put-down. First rank fiction very rarely makes a first rank movie. What to my…

The Slums of Beverly Hills, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins is another meditation on family, this time the highly dysfunctional, motherless Abramowitz family in Southern California in 1976. The patriarch, Murray Abramowitz (Alan Arkin) is a sometime car salesman but mainly unemployed drifter who moves his family around from one cheap apartment or motel…

The Ice Storm, directed by Ang Lee from a screenplay by James Schamus, based on a novel by Rick Moody, is a very moving film which, nevertheless, ultimately undermines its own emotional force by trying, after the manner of so many recent movies, to be as much an historical as a literary statement. For what,…