Springfield Rifle

Like The Damned United, this is another British film which derives its oomph from a (mostly) successful attempt to recapture the way things were decades ago — and persuading us that it matters

John Frankenheimer’s new movie, Reindeer Games, for which Ehren Kruger (Arlington Road) wrote the screenplay, is in some ways an admirably old-fashioned sort of picture. Or so I am inclined to think of any movie whose soul is its plot, as it generally is in the movies of the greatest directors from Hitchcock to Rohmer….

Amazon, the IMAX film now being shown at the Museum of Natural History in New York, begins with scenes from an old black and white movie of pith-helmeted explorers fighting everything from vicious natives with poison-dart blowguns, to crocodiles to piranha. The picture is a tiny keyhole in the middle of the screen. Then up…

The Hi Lo Country, based on a novel by Max Evans published in 1961, has a weird period flavor to it even though, as directed by Stephen Frears, it is also very much of the nineties. You can see in it elements of Hemingway’s austere sensualism and bedrock conviction that literary art mainly consists of…

Safe Men written and directed by John Hamburg is that rare thing, a Tarantino-clone that nevertheless manages to be rather witty and charming. Sam (Sam Rockwell) and Eddie (Steve Zahn) are a couple of absolutely awful itinerant singers in Providence, Rhode Island who are but dimly aware of how bad they are. Sam, in particular,…

Every so often a reader writes asking me to lighten up, to stop looking so closely at the movies I review and just relax and enjoy them. I always wonder why people would bother reading a critic who did that. Could they not relax and enjoy a movie themselves unless they could reassure themselves that…