Sands of Iwo Jima, The

A chick-flick for women of a certain age — and a certain age greater than their emotional one

Kenneth Branagh’s new film of Love’s Labour’s Lost has very little to do with the play of the same name by William Shakespeare. Branagh’s marketability (such as it is) has always been pretty closely tied to that of the 16th century playwright, but here he is shamelessly using the Shakespeare brand name simply in order…

Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet is a good example of Shakespeare killed by terminal hipness. It is remarkably clever, and even has some good dramatic ideas. Having Juliet (Claire Danes) wake up just before Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) drinks the poison and simply cutting Friar Lawrence (Pete Postlethwaite) out of it is an interesting notion and…

Live Flesh by Pedro Almodovar begins with a scene, set on a lonely night in 1970, in which a baby is born on a bus on the way to the hospital. There is a comic bus driver and a comic older woman helping the baby be born. “If idiots like us didn’t give birth,” she…