Bullitt (1968)

David Mamet’s remake of The Winslow Boy — which was first adapted for the screen from Terence Rattigan’s play by Anthony Asquith in 1948 — gets my universally-coveted double stars not so much because it is a wonderful movie as because it is a wonderful event — a poke in the eye to the Zeitgeist…

Gross-out comedies are now as much a tradition of the summer movie season as the special-effects blockbusters — and sometimes the two are hard to tell one from another. Scary Movie, which shot to the top of the list of box office grosses (if you’ll pardon the expression) in the week after it opened, purports…

Who lives by the plot shall die by the plot. Copland, written and directed by James Mangold, is an old-fashioned, plot-driven, realistic thriller that almost succeeds but that falls down because of a central incoherence in the plot. The problem is this. Everything depends on the far reaching ramifications of what happens one night to…

Chicks behind bars — how can that not be titillating? Liz Garbus has found a way to make it positively dull

The movies are now where we go to be told what to be afraid of — namely, reality. From American Greatness

Like Felicia’s Journey, Patricia Rozema’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is a film whose other virtues—in particular, the visual evocation of Regency England and the excellence of the performances of Frances O’Connor as the heroine, Fanny Price, Alessandro Nivola and Embeth Davidtz as the charming brother and sister, Henry and Mary Crawford, and Jonny…