Sergeant York

Breakdown by Jonathan Mostow is a superior sort of thriller that is a step in the right direction after recent Hollywood examples of the genre—that is, in the direction of the things that ordinary, reasonable people really do fear. Which is to say not unbelievably big Amazonian snakes or volcanos erupting in downtown Los Angeles…

Jackie Brown confirms two things we have always really known about Quentin Tarantino at his best (at his worst he is just unspeakable). One is that he is the most compulsively watchable filmmaker now working in America. He knows how to keep an audience riveted to the screen, and he knows how to tell a…

A very watchable if somewhat slight account of the stranded hiker who had to cut his own arm off to survive

Martin Scorsese’s attempt to reconcile Christianity with multiculturalism is unlikely to impress anyone not already a convert to the latter

Beloved, from the novel by Toni Morrison and directed by Jonathan Demme, exploits the sufferings of black people under slavery on behalf of a radical feminism that is merely parasitical upon them. Blacks in general and black men in particular ought to resent having their own history hijacked in this way, and used in the…

A fascinating documentary tracing the history of a favorite terrorist technique, but one a bit too ready to take the terrorists at their own valuation