Sands of Iwo Jima, The

Film critics are so easy to please. You just have to give them a high concept, a bit of politically correct cynicism about the evils of “capitalism” or the “system” or the armed forces or the government security apparatus, add a couple of hip, attractive and sexually adventurous people with a vulnerability or two between…

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 slight but charming Indian take on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Brother, a Russian film written and directed by Alexei Balabanov, stars Sergei Bodrov, Jr, as Danila, a recently discharged soldier at a loose end who makes his way to St. Petersburg where his brother, Viktor (Victor Suhorukov) is somebody in the burgeoning underworld of Russia’s second city. The city itself is a main character in…

One tries to be fair, of course. I admit up front that I don’t much like either Matthew McConaughey or Jennifer Lopez, and I acknowledge that it is very likely that my dislike is what accounts for what seems to me the total lack of “chemistry” between the two of them in Adam Shankman’s The…