High Noon

Please note that the star in this case has a very special meaning. This is that if you have strong nerves and are not subject to nightmares—and you live in one of the few places where Funny Games by the Austrian director Michael Haneke can be seen—by all means go to see it. But don’t…

A Merry War is the American title given to the adaptation by Robert Bierman (director) and Alan Plater (writer) of George Orwell’s sunniest novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying— presumably because Americans don’t know what an aspidistra is. For the record, it is a houseplant with long, leathery swordlike leaves which, in the 1930s was a…

Are Americans getting to be the good guys in the movies once again? Well, maybe not altogether so.

My Best Friend’s Wedding by P.J. Hogan (written by Ronald Bass) is not as awful as I expected it to be, given that it stars my least favorite actress, Julia Roberts, as Julianne, the gal who discovers she’s in love with a man she thought was her best friend when he announces he’s getting married…

Mrs Dalloway is directed by Marleen Gorris, the Dutch director of the unrelentingly feminist Antonia’s Line, from a screenplay by Eileen Atkins. The screenplay, so far as I can tell, is very faithful to Virginia Woolf’s novel, so fans of Mrs Woolf may enjoy it. The rest of us may take it as Ms Gorris…

A visual delight which there are numerous but often mutually contradictory reasons for feeling guilty about enjoying