Children of Men

Analyze This, directed by Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day), stars Robert DeNiro as Paul Vitti, a notorious New York mobster who suddenly finds he’s having panic attacks. He thinks they’re heart attacks. When the doctor tells him that they are in fact psychosomatic, he is incredulous: “Do I look like a guy who panics?” The doctor…

Ma Vie en Rose or My Life in Pink by Alain Berliner manages to be a charming film, rather in the manner of the upbeat and jokey postmodernism of Berliner’s fellow Belgian, Jaco Van Dormael. Enjoyable as it is in many ways, however, one can never quite lose the sense of being got at by—that…

Trust Merchant-Ivory to find a way to transform the elegant and the sophisticated into the banal

Where Twin Town is determinedly cutting edge, Brassed Off by Mark Herman is quaintly old-fashioned. It is so both in being a straightforward, Rocky type story of a Yorkshire village’s brass band making it to the finals of the national band competition and in being the crudest sort of left wing propaganda—the sort of propaganda…

Fred Barnes, writing in The Weekly Standard, tells us that he doesn’t go to the movies anymore, partly because he has got out of the habit and partly because they start too late or too early but mainly because of the left-wing bias of most of the thrillers. “In most thrillers it’s some conspiratorial right-wing…

The Boxer by Jim Sheridan deserves some praise for being one of the very few among the spate of recent movies about “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland (including Sheridan’s own) that actually tries to depict the I.R.A. as it is and not with the romantic patina of Michael Collins or, most recently, The Jackal. But…