Searchers, The

A self-satisfied yuppie romance that founders on its inability to distinguish between love and sex

One ought, I think, to be suspicious of films about mental illness. They nearly always call on us to pity and thus to condescend to their characters. Such feelings are not those elicited by great art, which requires us to recognize in the characters an essential likeness to ourselves. But Angel Baby by Michael Rymer,…

More proof, if proof were needed, that feminist empowerment fantasies can be dangerous to women.

Dirty Work, directed by Bob Saget, is utterly without redeeming features: boring, stupid and unfunny. Even my two sub-teen boys thought it was bad, and worse than that movies like this do not get. Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

The Harmonists, directed by Joseph Vilsmaier, is the “based-on-a-true story” story of The Comedian Harmonists, an immensely popular singing group in pre-war Germany that eventually had to break up, as three of its six members were Jewish. Like nearly every other film set in its time and place, this one is ultimately sucked into the…

Near the end of Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro), Marcel Camus’s masterpiece of 1959, there comes what can only be described as an authorial disclaimer that strikes the film’s one seriously false note. “The happiness of the poor is the great illusion of Carnival,” we are told, more or less out of the blue. Up until…