Big Sleep, The

They don’t come much more charming than Shower, a Chinese film by Zhang Yang with a delicacy and a poignancy in its humor that is almost French. Its theme is a compelling one too, depicting in comic yet poignant form the clash between the new economy in post- Mao, post-Deng China and the old ways…

David Gordon Green’s thoughtful indy strives for worthiness as well as likability but falls foul of its own earnestness

"In short measures life may perfect be." — Ben Jonson

Hollywood producers have always been a prey to the delusion that what makes great novels great are their stories, or their characters or their “ideas”—things whose transfer to celluloid is fairly straightforward. But as Stéphane Mallarmé once said of poems, novels are not made of ideas but of words. Without Dickens’s words, Great Expectations is…

Time and again Hollywood, wearing its artist’s beret, attempts to satirize the entertainment business, of which Hollywood itself is so huge a part. Time and time and again it fails. I wonder why that is? By coincidence, we have the two latest attempts opening in consecutive weeks. But where 15 Minutes is a typical failure…

Lucie Aubrac by Claude Berri (the great director of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring), is another illustration of the use of cliché in great movie-making. Based on the true life events recorded in the memoir, Ils partiront dans l’ivresse by Lucie Aubrac herself, this film hits us over the head with its…