Big Sleep, The

The best that can be said about a movie that should never have been made is that it’s not so bad as might have been expected

Faust — as he appears in Playing God and Devil’s Advocate — appears to be all the rage in Hollywood at the moment. Coincidently, a Norwegian version of the Faust tale in Jan Troell’s Hamsun is knocking around out there somewhere at the moment. You may even get to see it if you live in…

To the question of why anyone would want to rewrite King Lear so as to make Goneril and Regan the heroines and poor old Lear and (to a lesser extent) Cordelia the villains, there can only be one answer: in order to make a revolutionary statement. Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, now translated to the…

Here is the story of Message in a Bottle, directed by Luis Madoki. A desperately sad widower and boat-builder, the strikingly handsome Garret Blake (Kevin Costner), puts letters to his dead wife in bottles and throws the bottles into the sea. They are found by a beautiful young, unattached single mother called Theresa (Robin Wright…

The Harmonists, directed by Joseph Vilsmaier, is the “based-on-a-true story” story of The Comedian Harmonists, an immensely popular singing group in pre-war Germany that eventually had to break up, as three of its six members were Jewish. Like nearly every other film set in its time and place, this one is ultimately sucked into the…

The opening of Mean Girls this week seems an appropriate occasion to take a look at some really mean girls