Raiders of the Lost Ark

Every few years around Christmas time, Steven Spielberg feels the need to trot out his social conscience for public examination. Four years ago it was Schindler’s List, a film designed to show how bad the Holocaust was. This year it is Amistad—the story of a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish ship in 1839 which created…

A lovely film from the author of Gomorrah that explores, with humor but little hope, the God-shaped hole in the life of our culture

They just don’t make cads the way they used to

Not One Less, directed by Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern etc) is a propaganda film, a sad come-down for a very talented guy, I think—though its portrait of life among some of the poorest villages of China today is brilliantly rendered and memorably affecting. Here, too, is truth, and this is not…

A remarkable evocation by the director of Central Station of life in the outback of Brazil 90 years ago is spoiled by a facile ending.

Slick, good-looking and morally bankrupt — both the movie and its hero