Springfield Rifle

David Mamet’s State and Main is so slow moving, so sluggishly edited, that you’ve got to wonder if it is so through incompetence — though this might be OK for other kinds of films, it’s disastrous in a comedy — or if there is some subtle purpose to it: an attempt to assert, for example,…

Readers may remember my reservations about the all-but universally praised L.A. Confidential a few months ago — a film which I note continues to garner award after award from less fastidious critics. Yet, thought I, what was the point of a movie in which everybody but a couple of utterly self-absorbed heroes is basically scum?…

A very funny movie, as you would expect from Ricky Gervais, but sadly lacking in ambition

Waiting for Guffman is the cheapest of cheap comedy. All it takes is our suspension of disbelief (easy in New York and L.A.) that the rubes in fly-over country could be as witless and unhip as they are presented as being here. Hip is our new class marker: snobbery on the basis of race or…

First the good news about Along Came Polly, written and directed by John Hamburg. In parts it is very funny. True, a lot of the humor depends on thunderous borborygmus and torrential bodily extromissions, which may seem simply gross to those of finer sensitivities. Presumably Mr. Hamburg, who co-wrote the screenplay of that earlier and…

Eye of the Beholder, written and directed by Stephan Elliott from a novel by Marc Behm is routine post-modern noir—which is to say that it has no interest in the kind of tight plotting or carefully built up motivation that characterized traditional film noir. Presumably the media sophisticates who patronize movies these days don’t care…