Raiders of the Lost Ark

The Spanish Prisoner, written and directed by David Mamet, gives expression to a refined kind of paranoia born of what we might call sophistication-anxiety. This results in the common assumption among contemporary writers, artists and (especially) filmmakers — see, for example, the recent movies Wild Things and L.A. Confidential — that everything must be different…

Woody Allen’s decline into self-parody accelerates

Mike Myers has done it again. Will anyone outside of academe henceforth be able to look at the “Swinging Sixties” with a straight face?

This is the best version of J.M. Barrie’s classic that there has ever been on film, and maybe in any medium

Another ghetto morality play, set in New Mexico, urging us to stay out of jail. Jail is very bad for you. Who knew?

The 13th Warrior, directed by John McTiernan, is a Hollywoodification of Michael Crichton’s attempt to re- imagine Beowulf in his novel, Eaters of the Dead, with the help of a 10th century Arabic account of adventures in Central Asia. It was Kipling who pioneered this sort of thing in his brilliant story, “The Knife and…