It Happened One Night

“She was too good for this life. . .” wrote Philip Larkin of the graffiti-covered bathing beauty on the advertising poster for “Sunny Prestatyn” and his ironic pity came to mind as I watched Gillian Anderson piling up the pathos as Lily Bart in Terence Davies’s screen adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of…

[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 10, 2013] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

The movies of the Alien series have always had as subtext the feminist view of abortion, but never more so than the latest, called Alien Resurrection, which comes to us from Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Jeunet was co-director of the very weird French films Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, and this looks a lot like both…

The Hollywood in-joke of presenting Jack Nicholson as a therapist for angry people takes this movie a long way, but not long enough.

The American distributors who refused an American market to Adrian Lyne’s new film version of Lolita until it was already booked for its first run on Showtime, the cable network (beginning on August 2), said that they did so on the grounds that the film was no good. Of course, these are the same people…

Martin Scorsese’s new movie, Bringing Out the Dead is yet further evidence of its director’s fascination with the manic personality as well as his undoubted skill with the camera. Unfortunately, those of us who do not share this fascination are likely to find one manic personality looking rather too much like another, and the would-be…