Raiders of the Lost Ark

Adam Sandler as the new Gary Cooper? If you can believe that, you might actually like this awful, unfunny movie.

Everything that is important in Girl, Interrupted, directed by James Mangold and based on the memoir by Suzanna Kaysen, can be condensed into one comment by the mental institution attendant, Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg) as she attempts to give the reluctant Suzanna (Winona Ryder) a bath. “This place is a f****** fascist torture chamber,” says the…

Zero Effect is a wacky detective yarn written and directed by Jake Kasdan and starring Bill Pullman as Daryl Zero, an updated, Americanized version of Sherlock Holmes. Zero is a reclusive private detective who gives his cases names like “The Case of the Mismatched Shoelaces” and commands spectacularly high fees for his “highly intuitive” powers…

If you are a Buddhist or very fond of soccer—or possibly one of the yuppie aristocracy who are both—then The Cup is for you. Even I, who have very little time for either Buddhism or soccer, found it completely charming. Written and directed by Khyentse Norbu, it tells the story of a Buddhist monastery in…

Nettoyage à Sec (Dry Cleaning) by Anne Fontaine presents us with a French version of that now familiar Hollywood trope, merely gestured towards in 8mm, the capacity for sexual adventurism and even perversion in all of us. Nicole (Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie (Charles Berling) have been married for 15 years and run a dry-cleaning establishment in…

One ought, I think, to be suspicious of films about mental illness. They nearly always call on us to pity and thus to condescend to their characters. Such feelings are not those elicited by great art, which requires us to recognize in the characters an essential likeness to ourselves. But Angel Baby by Michael Rymer,…