High Noon

Naturally, I had hoped to be able to avoid going to see Lasse Hallström’s sickly-sweet Chocolat. After The Cider House Rules, indeed, I hoped never to have to see another movie by Hallström. But when Chocolat was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar I resigned myself to the necessity of having to waste two hours…

[See “Entry from July 30, 2008” under “My Diary”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

What Planet Are You From? is a charming progressive fable about the female domestication of wild masculinity that will appeal on different levels to those, like its director Mike Nichols, who wish that it might be so and to those who fear that it is so. For everybody else, there is the pleasure of the…

Judging from one or two other reviews I have seen, critics seem to think that Con Air, directed by Simon West and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, is meant to be a witty send up of the macho action flick of which it is ostensibly an example. Maybe this is because Mr West has a background…

Like David Lynch in The Straight Story, Mike Leigh apparently thought it was time to surprise us with Topsy-Turvy. Instead of his usual dark and sardonic and implicitly political look at present- day Britain, he offers us an ostensibly sunny period-piece about, of all things, the collaboration of W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and Sir Arthur…

Father’s Day by Ivan Reitman is based on the preposterous premiss that an apparently happily-married woman, upset at her husband’s failure to pursue their runaway 17 year old boy who has left home to become a rock-band groupie, would tell not one but two old boyfriends that they might be the boy’s father—in the expectation…