Springfield Rifle

An adaptation which brings out the worst in Philip Roth’s novel

Gekko No Sasayaki or “Moonlight Whispers” is a brilliant little Japanese film, written and directed by Akihiko Shiota, about young love which suddenly spins out of control and becomes sexual perversion. Not a very promising subject, you might think, and the quasi-clinical dimension of the film, though it has a serious point to make, is…

A charmless, tedious and unfunny movie that cultivates an image of — of all things — intelligence

Bruce McCulloch does the best he can to make a movie his fellow Canadian, Tom Green, cannot reduce to an episode of “The Tom Green Show.” He can’t.

Like A Merry War, the adaptation of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying that came out last year, Metroland, directed by Philip Saville and adapted by Adrian Hodge from the novel by Julian Barnes, in the end boils down to a pretty banal discovery of the obvious. For some reason, perhaps the historical accident of…

Kenneth Branagh’s new film of Love’s Labour’s Lost has very little to do with the play of the same name by William Shakespeare. Branagh’s marketability (such as it is) has always been pretty closely tied to that of the 16th century playwright, but here he is shamelessly using the Shakespeare brand name simply in order…