Sergeant York

A charming romance — as these things go nowadays — built along fairy tale lines which also appeals to the multiculturalist in all of us

Tea With Mussolini is, like so many other works by its director and co- writer (with John Mortimer) Franco Zeffirelli, for movie-goers with rather more of a sweet-tooth than I generally find I have. Adapted from Zeffirelli’s autobiography, it tells the story of a small Italian boy called Luca (played as a child by Charlie…

A movie about the war in Iraq and the men who fight it whose superiority to the other movies about the war is mostly owing to how bad they are

The 12 year-old eponymous hero of Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot, played by Jamie Bell, is made to say more than once that “just ‘cause I like ballet it doesn’t mean I’m a poof.” Sounds reasonable to me. But the film itself has a different story to tell. Both the introduction of Billy’s cross-dressing schoolboy friend,…

I wouldn’t want it to be thought that I was piling on. Anyone who might otherwise have been tempted to see Battlefield Earth will need no discouragement from me to make him think better of the idea. I don’t know if I would go quite so far as the critic who called it “the worst…

A harrowing but at the same time politically and morally tendentious retelling of events on board the fourth hijacked plane of 9/11, and the only one not to reach its objective.