Searchers, The

A sort of post-modern tragedy — if that’s not a contradiction in terms — that is too faithful to the novel but will probably win lots of Oscars for it

Occasionally I go to see a film by a young independent director in the hopes of seeing some signs of life beyond the stuffed and mounted product of Hollywood—and hence in the hope of an escape from the moral smugness of the Hollywood ethos. But, judging by Crossing Fields, written and directed by a young…

Thanks to our 21^st century taste for exhibitionism, documentaries are now a better bet for revealing and harrowing portrayals of domestic and family life than fiction

The Pillow Book by Peter Greenaway is a typical Greenaway blend of the bizarre, the disgusting and the boring. Especially the boring. You wouldn’t think it, would you? That a man could concentrate so exclusively on weird sexual fetishes (in this case, a woman’s desire to have her body written on — and then to…

You’ve got to wonder about the chutzpah — or the stupidity — of a director who would invite comparisons between his movie and what is arguably the greatest work of dramatic art ever penned, Shakespeare’s King Lear. But the Danish director, Kristian Levring, has done it, and on the whole we can be glad that…

The Locusts, written and directed by John Patrick Kelley, is a tedious Freudian melodrama which, like so much else that comes out of Hollywood these days, bends every effort to convince us of the awful secrets buried beneath those smiling, happy-families exteriors of the 1950s. Such a belief in the real hideousness of apparent domestic…