High Noon

The movies can’t help themselves: they chase the chimera of the “real man” within the great man as great men themselves once chased military glory

The Corruptor, directed by James Foley, is a routine shoot-’em-up that briefly aspires to something higher. Chinese supercop Nick Chen (Chow Yun Fat), drawn by the lure of money and easy sex into the underworld of Chinatown, New York, is receiving bribes and kickbacks from a Mr Big of the Chinese rackets, Henry Lee (Ric…

My Giant directed by Michael Lehmann is yet another depressingly heart-warming tale from Billy Crystal, who is second in the heart-warming league only to his friend and co-star in the relentlessly heartwarming Father’s Day, Robin Williams. Someone once said that all comedy is cruel, but Billy Crystal is living proof that this is not true….

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort—which the American distributors are translating as The Young Girls of Rochefort—was directed by the late Jacques Demy in 1967 and now appears recut and restored by Demy’s widow, Agnes Varda. It is a strange—indeed, sometimes hilariously weird—but oddly charming French attempt at a Hollywood musical which stars the young Catherine Deneuve…

The impulse behind this multicultural French film is a good one, but the translation makes it sound as if these French high school kids were trying, and failing, to talk in Ebonics

There is a scene in October Sky, directed by Joe Johnston, when the four “Rocket Boys” from Coalwood, West Virginia., inspired by the sight of Sputnik streaking through the night sky, are setting off one of their rockets. On a sylvan road beside the launch site there appears an original, 1958 Corvette convertible in red…