Big Sleep, The

Velvet Goldmine, written and directed by Todd Haynes, comes with the following “Director’s Statement” Velvet Goldmine is a valentine to the sounds and images that erupted in and around London in the early 1970’s: to Brian Ferry, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed — and the extraordinary inversions they imposed on our notions of the…

Robert Altman’s new picture, Cookie’s Fortune, is like all his films in having in it a lot of good things pushed to—and usually way beyond—their limit. Here the relentless folksiness of the sleepy Mississippi town, Holly Springs, is truly charming most of the time, but on occasion it becomes almost enough to give Andy Griffith…

Taste of Cherry by the Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, is not for those whose idea of movie fun is explosions and shootings, yet its concerns with matters of life and death are no less exigent for that. Over the opening credits, Mr Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) is cruising in his Range Rover, peering intently at knots…

The Way of the Gun, a movie written and directed for critics by Christopher McQuarrie — who won an Oscar for the screenplay of that other critics’ movie, The Usual Suspects — begins and ends with a voiceover narration by one of the two stars, Ryan Phillippe, purporting to debunk the idea of a natural…

Let’s stipulate that teenage sexual energy and the sorts of things it drives the young’uns to get up to are inherently funny subjects. Shakespeare has the grumbling old shepherd in The Winter’s Tale say: “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is…

The comic foundations of the original Barbershop are not sturdy enough to bear the weight of another such edifice