It Happened One Night

In Ride With the Devil, the great Taiwanese director Ang Lee shows once again that he has a kind of genius for the old Hollywood trick of adapting second-rank fiction to the big screen. This is not meant to be a put-down. First rank fiction very rarely makes a first rank movie. What to my…

The Big One is Michael Moore’s return to the merry prankster movie—like his breakout hit Roger and Me—after a detour through a feeble attempt at comedy-drama in Canadian Bacon. He is once again playing a kind of political Allen Funt who brings his cameras into various corporate headquarters—or, in one instance, the Wisconsin state capital—and…

A Civil Action, directed by Steven Zaillian, is not, as I expected it to be, another of those God-awful Grisham things about noble, crusading trial lawyers getting the better of evil, corrupt insurance companies. In real life, it is usually the trial lawyers who are the bad guys and the insurance companies their victims, but…

An exciting and well-plotted if somewhat sentimental adventure set in the closing weeks of World War II in occupied Holland

Dante’s Peak by Roger Donaldson (written by Leslie Bohem) is a standard-formula disaster movie. The hero, Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) is a ruggedly handsome vulcanologist who (we learn over the opening credits) has lost his fiancée, a colleague, to an erupting volcano. Now he harbors his secret sorrow and treads a lone path through the…

When J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World had its premiere in Dublin in 1907 there were riots in the streets because the play was thought to be a vicious slander on the Irish people. Synge had seemed to suggest that it was characteristic of the Irish blarney, at least among the rural folk that…