Children of Men

Very Bad Things, written and directed by Peter Berg, aspires to be a black comedy but it forgets to be comic. The title is a true enough description of what is to be found inside, but as none of the bad things are also funny, the movie itself is merely. . .a bad thing. Jon…

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,…

The portrait of a real-life French con-man who doesn’t succeed in being as charming as the film wants to portray him as being

The 13th Warrior, directed by John McTiernan, is a Hollywoodification of Michael Crichton’s attempt to re- imagine Beowulf in his novel, Eaters of the Dead, with the help of a 10th century Arabic account of adventures in Central Asia. It was Kipling who pioneered this sort of thing in his brilliant story, “The Knife and…

An interesting updating of Henry James’s novel chiefly worth seeing for the performance of its title character

Let’s Talk About Sex is written and directed by Troy Beyer, who also stars as Jazz, an agony aunt columnist in Miami who wants to be the host of a TV talk show called “Girl Talk.” Her getting the gig depends on her putting together a demo tape in only a few days, which starts…