Sergeant York

A charming Australian coming-of-age tale in which Brenda Blethyn gets to polish up and make more sympathetic her now-familiar screen persona as a loud, vulgar woman of the lower classes

It pains me to have to criticize William Friedkin’s movie, Rules of Engagement, because it is that rare thing, a pro- military movie out of Hollywood. Moreover, its scenes of combat are well-made and gripping to watch — both those set in Vietnam in 1968, when a younger Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) saved the…

A Civil Action, directed by Steven Zaillian, is not, as I expected it to be, another of those God-awful Grisham things about noble, crusading trial lawyers getting the better of evil, corrupt insurance companies. In real life, it is usually the trial lawyers who are the bad guys and the insurance companies their victims, but…

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…

Mark Twain’s America written and directed by Stephen Low is the latest in IMAX 3-D and illustrates that basic critical principle, the law of the inverse relationship between the sophistication of a film’s technique and the quality of its content. The feeble idea on which this movie is based is that you can relate various…

Slick, good-looking and utterly empty, Steven Zaillian’s vision of fascism come to America is laughable as politics and incoherent as cinema