Bullitt (1968)

Did you know that gossip can be vicious and destructive—especially when false rumors are deliberately planted by idle and amoral youths just to see what happens? No? Then Gossip, directed by Davis Guggenheim and written by Gregory Poirier, is definitely the movie for you. Even if you did know these things but have a glossy-magazine…

Pity poor Pat Tillman, fated to be a posthumous propaganda tool for one side or the other in our increasingly graceless public dialogue on matters of war and peace

Drop Dead Gorgeous, directed by Michael Patrick Jann, is intermittently quite funny, but ultimately doesn’t work because it is offensively patronizing to the people of small-town Minnesota whom it sees through the eyes of New York or Los Angeles—or some even more fabulously sophisticated place. In this view of the American heartland, the people are…

Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown could be said to be a loving, autumnal tribute to the two great passions of its director’s life outside of the cinema, namely, jazz and psychotherapy. True, the movie contains no scenes involving therapy, nor even any reference to it, but its subtext is the fundamental therapeutic assumption of vulgar…

Love and Death on Long Island, directed by Richard Kwietniowski from a novel by Gilbert Adair, is not really about death. Its title puns on the name of its principal character, played by John Hurt, who is called Giles De’Ath. But it might as well have been called De’Ath in Venice, since it is all…

Next Stop, Wonderland, written and directed by Brad Anderson, is a charming romantic comedy with a great many funny moments, though it doesn’t quite pull everything together in its rather unsatisfactory ending. But it has an excellent beginning. Erin (Hope Davis) comes home one day to find her live-in boyfriend, Sean (Phil Hoffman), moving out…