Sergeant York

A sort of post-modern tragedy — if that’s not a contradiction in terms — that is too faithful to the novel but will probably win lots of Oscars for it

Almost Famous begins in 1969 with a literary discussion about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird between a precocious eleven year-old, William Miller (Michael Angarano), and his widowed mother, Elaine (Frances McDormand). A college professor in San Diego, Elaine has obviously invested a great deal of hope in her son, whom she intends to be…

Sling Blade by Billy Bob Thornton deserves credit for the acting job of its director and writer, who also plays the principal role, that of Karl Childers, a mentally retarded man in his 30s released from a state institution — the state seems to be Arkansas — after serving twenty years for murdering his mother…

Comic gangsters reassure us that, even in the most civilized of countries, civilization is for suckers.

Occasionally I go to see a film by a young independent director in the hopes of seeing some signs of life beyond the stuffed and mounted product of Hollywood—and hence in the hope of an escape from the moral smugness of the Hollywood ethos. But, judging by Crossing Fields, written and directed by a young…

Hurlyburly directed by Anthony Drazan and written (from his stageplay) by David Rabe has an all-star cast, but it cannot escape from the poverty of its script, in which nothing very much happens (people come and go) and all the characters talk exactly alike—that is in a kind of souped-up psychobabble with an occasionally Pinterian…