Sands of Iwo Jima, The

Firestorm is the kind of picture which it would be nice to be able to encourage with a sympathetic review. It is the story of heroic men—in this case the legendary “smoke jumpers” who parachute into forest fires to help put them out—fighting against both nature and bad guys and prevailing against both. Nor is…

Mark Twain’s America written and directed by Stephen Low is the latest in IMAX 3-D and illustrates that basic critical principle, the law of the inverse relationship between the sophistication of a film’s technique and the quality of its content. The feeble idea on which this movie is based is that you can relate various…

You know you’re in trouble with a movie that begins as the camera pans over the spines of a pile of highbrow books. Look at all those impressive authors’ names! Kierkegaard, Chekhov, Joyce, the Marquis de Sade. The selection is as telling (and is meant to be) as the books themselves about what it is…

Felicia’s Journey ought to have all the ingredients of a terrific movie. The novel by William Trevor on which it is based is first rate, a haunting study of the banality of evil that sticks in the mind long after it is read. The director, Atom Egoyan, did a fine job with Russell Banks’s The…

Gang Related, written and directed by Jim Kouf, is better than it sounds. Given that it is yet another crooked cop caper and that it features the late Tupac Shakur in over his head as one of the two bent patrolmen, it actually manages to be watchable through the sheer strength of Kouf’s writing and…

A well-made and emotionally satisfying study in elemental human passions that is splendidly down-to-earth — in more ways than one