Fistful of Dollars

Waiting for Guffman is the cheapest of cheap comedy. All it takes is our suspension of disbelief (easy in New York and L.A.) that the rubes in fly-over country could be as witless and unhip as they are presented as being here. Hip is our new class marker: snobbery on the basis of race or…

A notorious and notoriously disgusting bit of cinema which, nevertheless, has a bit more to it than the rest of Lars von Trier’s films

I really wanted to like Mouse Hunt, which was officially directed by Gore Verbinski but unfortunately bears the hallmarks of the directorial style of Steven Spielberg, out of whose “Dreamworks” studio it comes. Every now and then, it is true, the skills of the comic duo of Nathan Lane and Lee Evans as the brothers…

A portrait of spiritual and emotional emptiness among the academic classes — that may or may not be spiritually and emotionally empty itself

The Slums of Beverly Hills, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins is another meditation on family, this time the highly dysfunctional, motherless Abramowitz family in Southern California in 1976. The patriarch, Murray Abramowitz (Alan Arkin) is a sometime car salesman but mainly unemployed drifter who moves his family around from one cheap apartment or motel…

An absolute mess of a film, Robert Benton’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel will leave viewers wondering what on earth it all has to do with Bill Clinton