Sergeant York

Small Soldiers, directed by Joe Dante, is typical of Hollywood attitudes towards military values and military people. Even the grief of soldiers for their dead comrades in arms is made fun of as the leader of the toy soldiers brought to life by computer wizardry pronounces over one of his men that: “Nick Nitro’s battery…

Hav Plenty by Christopher Cherot is a young man’s film about love and success in the black middle class and as such, I suppose, is to be applauded merely for existing. At least it is a welcome break from those tiresome boyz in the hood and other forms of playing up to black stereotypes. But…

They don’t come much more charming than Shower, a Chinese film by Zhang Yang with a delicacy and a poignancy in its humor that is almost French. Its theme is a compelling one too, depicting in comic yet poignant form the clash between the new economy in post- Mao, post-Deng China and the old ways…

My Life So Far, directed by Hugh Hudson from a memoir called Son of Adam by Sir Denis Forman, former director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is rather slight but utterly charming. Lit with the soft backglow of memory, it presents the Oedipal conflict between young Fraser Pettigrew (Robert Norman) and his eccentric…

In Love and War is a New Line release of a Richard Attenborough film, based on Henry Villard’s book, Hemingway in Love and War. It is co-written by Villard’s son, Dimitri. Villard Sr. was in Italy with Hemingway and Agnes von Kurowsky, the (American) nurse on whom Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms is…

Here are the good things about The Legend of Bagger Vance, written by Jeremy Leven from the novel by Steven Pressfield and directed by Robert Redford. It tells a story set in Savannah, Georgia, in about 1930 and never once mentions Jim Crow or Southern white racism. So familiar by now is the iconography of…