High Noon

You should be ashamed to be watching this movie. I know I was.

Holy Smoke by Jane Campion is a movie whose most basic assumptions—arising out of a weirdly anachronistic, 1970s-vintage view of bourgeois life—makes it rather difficult to like. From the first glimpse she gives us of “Sans Souci, Sydney,” an overhead shot of acres of tiled-roof bungalows that bespeaks “suburbia,” we know that Miss Campion’s sympathies…

You sure can tell that Among Giants was written by Simon Beaufoy (it was directed by Sam Miller), last heard from as the screenwriter of The Full Monty. Like Monty, this movie is set in (or near) Sheffield in Yorkshire and is an exercise in nostalgia and sentimentality of a peculiarly English—especially a northern English—type….

Ravenous, written by Ted Griffin and directed by Antonia Bird, is one of the weirdest movies I’ve seen in a long time. I even found myself rather enjoying it for the amusingly original way it has of making its highly dubious point. This is, as I understand it, the presentation of an essentially feminist view…

Maybe I’m getting too old to take a continual exposure to our morally radioactive popular culture. The experience of watching Whipped, written and directed by Peter M. Cohen, produced on me the same effect that the sight of Poor Tom o’Bedlam had on the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear: “I’th’ last night’s storm I…

At a certain age, almost everyone is inclined to see his mother as a suffering saint and his father as a bully and a tyrant. It is a part of the process of growing up and corresponds with a youth’s period of greatest need to declare independence him- or herself from the paternal tie. It…