Fistful of Dollars

Goodbye Lover, directed by Roland Joffé, is yet another inadequate attempt by Hollywood to recapture the look and feel, if not the spirit, of 1940s vintage films noirs. But as I noted in my review of L.A. Confidential, of which this is surely a stable-mate, the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. It has…

Healing by Killing by Nitzam Aviram, an Israeli director, is a documentary which pretty persuasively establishes the case that it was the Nazi practice of euthanasia for victims of handicap, mental retardation and so forth which led to the holocaust. “Without the psychiatric death industry,” as one of Aviram’s interviewees puts it, “Auschwitz and Treblinka…

It’s got Brad. And Julia. It’s also got a Very Big Star in a surprise cameo in the last reel playing (uncredited) the mysterious tycoon whom everybody has been talking about but no one has seen. And, as if all that were not enough for you, it’s got Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) in the very…

Slamnation by Paul Devlin is a ridiculous if not often comical documentary about the growing fashion of the “poetry slam” — a kind of competitive sport involving mostly execrable poetry and the little clique of neurotics and borderline exhibitionists who write it for performance before vast arenas of enthusiasts. The film tells the story of…

It is with some reluctance that I add my voice to the chorus of praise that has greeted Chicken Run, the latest from Nick Park’s and Peter Lord’s Aardman animation shop (now operating under the aegis of DreamWorks). It would have been more satisfying to think of this film as I had grown used to…

Yet another sob-story about the growing unpopularity of the mainstream media that doesn’t exactly tug at the heart-strings of at least one media critic