It Happened One Night

An extended dirty joke — that is, a very funny though obscene movie whose humor is, alas, inseparable from its obscenity

Lovers of the Arctic Circle is a handsomely constructed fable of love and destiny, written and directed by Julio Medem. Those with a taste for magic realism or the sunny po-mo fables of Jaco Van Dormael (Toto the Hero, The Eighth Day) may well enjoy it, though to my taste its weird Spanish romanticism and…

Whatever It Takes, directed by David Raynr and written by Mark Schwahn is yet another in the seemingly endless stream of movies which attempt to translate classic literature into American High School stories. This fad began in 1995 with what is still the best of its kind, Amy Heckerling’s adaptation of Emma, by Jane Austen,…

An occasionally enjoyable portrait of life for a latter-day version of the Noble Savage in the (very) low country off the Louisiana coast

Another propaganda effort, along the lines of Pleasantville or American Beauty, against what could still be called, in the 1950s, middle class morality.

Gekko No Sasayaki or “Moonlight Whispers” is a brilliant little Japanese film, written and directed by Akihiko Shiota, about young love which suddenly spins out of control and becomes sexual perversion. Not a very promising subject, you might think, and the quasi-clinical dimension of the film, though it has a serious point to make, is…