Sergeant York

A teenage sexual fantasy almost rises above its sordid and ridiculous premiss, but it finally falls victim to cliché.

The paradox of cinéma vérité is that the excitement of being in ever closer touch with real life via the camera is always being undermined by the banality of what real life generally has to show us. For this reason, the most vérité generally has to be the most feigning. But the various sorts of…

We might call Metro by Tom Carter a palimpsest movie—one where you can read another text beneath the one on the surface. To some extent this is true of all Hollywood movies, which are made (as they nearly always have been made) with a cavalier disregard for the writer’s craft. At some point in the…

A bleak, Third World love story that requires — but does not necessarily repay — a good deal of patience

Errol Morris’s fascinating documentary, Mr Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A Leuchter, Jr. is another chapter in the long and tragic history of the great American autodidact. Like so many of those immensely likeable and distinctively American “characters” who believe that they can reinvent the world, Fred is ultimately swallowed up by the…

The saga of media triumphalism continues and itself reaches a triumphalist stage