Sands of Iwo Jima, The

Cool violence is no more able to make up for the absurdities of the story than it is in The Matrix, which was Kurt Wimmer’s model.

Anywhere But Here, Wayne Wang’s adaptation to the screen of a novel by Mona Simpson, is a total chick-flick but still worth seeing for the terrific performances of Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman as the mother and daughter whose troubled relationship it is all about. In fact, the greatness of these two performances rather exaggerates…

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…

At one point in Space Cowboys, William “Hawk” Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones) says to Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood): “Old Age just brings out more of the Frank in you, Frank” The same could be said of Eastwood himself. Like pretty much all of the films he has been unwise enough to try directing, this one…

Love and Death on Long Island, directed by Richard Kwietniowski from a novel by Gilbert Adair, is not really about death. Its title puns on the name of its principal character, played by John Hurt, who is called Giles De’Ath. But it might as well have been called De’Ath in Venice, since it is all…

Pop cultural fantasy as a re-mythologization of the culture in the “progressive” interest — From The American Spectator of January-February, 2014