Big Sleep, The

An occasionally enjoyable portrait of life for a latter-day version of the Noble Savage in the (very) low country off the Louisiana coast

In Les Misérables, directed by Bille August, it is the film itself which turns out to be misérable: thin and poor and wretched and in need of feeding up. The one thing you don’t want to skimp on when you are filming an epic is the epic proportions. August, a fine director of intense and…

Martin Scorsese’s new movie, Bringing Out the Dead is yet further evidence of its director’s fascination with the manic personality as well as his undoubted skill with the camera. Unfortunately, those of us who do not share this fascination are likely to find one manic personality looking rather too much like another, and the would-be…

You know you’re in trouble with a movie that begins as the camera pans over the spines of a pile of highbrow books. Look at all those impressive authors’ names! Kierkegaard, Chekhov, Joyce, the Marquis de Sade. The selection is as telling (and is meant to be) as the books themselves about what it is…

Jodie Foster is mad and she isn’t going to take it anymore. Fortunately for her, she can kill people and still be the victim herself

This not-very-funny comedy does at least hold some interest as a parable of black upward mobility.