Bullitt (1968)

A heart-warming but rather self-congratulatory look backward at the people of 1947, few of whom could be said to come up to our high standards

A film critic called upon to review a James Bond movie feels a bit like a restaurant critic who is asked to review McDonald’s. The World is Not Enough, directed by Michael Apted, is like most of its 18 predecessors pure McEntertainment. Anyone who has been to the other Bond films will know exactly what…

The Cruise, directed by Bennett Miller, is really a one-man show featuring Timothy “Speed” Levitch, a tour guide with the Gray Line Tours in New York, who is a non-stop talker in a distinctively New York fashion, spouting a mixture of pseudo-profundity and nonsense in a vain attempt to show himself off as sage, prophet,…

The X-Files, directed by Rob Bowman (no relation) and written by the series’s creator, Chris Carter, gives us an example of the perfect post-modern movie, because it presents to us a non-functional conspiracy. That is to say, the conspiracy is detached from its objective, or else the objective is so obscure that it remains unclear…

I tried very hard to like A Simple Plan, written by Scott B.Smith and directed by Sam (Evil Dead) Raimi, but I was only partly successful. The movie seems to have been heavily influenced by Fargo, right down to the vast and snowy prairie landscapes and the unexpectedly satisfying moralism of the ending, and, insofar…

What makes Tim Story’s film so good as moral instruction is what makes it, um, not quite so good as a movie.