It Happened One Night

Rather like Safe Men, Return to Paradise, directed by Joseph Ruben (Sleeping With the Enemy, Money Train), is worth seeing even though it has a tendency to make light of criminal behavior. In this case, the criminal behavior is drug-taking. Three American friends, Sheriff (Vince Vaughn), Lewis (Joaquin Phoenix) and Tony (David Conrad) vacation in…

Well, here goes. The following, I know, is an invitation to hate-mail, but I have to say that Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, written and directed by George Lucas, demonstrates a remarkable paucity of imagination. The thought first came to me in the scene where Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) explains to Queen Amidala…

A bittersweet but well-executed comedy to which there is much more than may at first appear.

As in Waiting for Guffman and Best In Show, Christopher Guest takes a satirical sledge-hammer to some pretty small nuts, but his film is also, and once again, uproariously funny

In The Hurricane, Norman Jewison is going through the motions. His film takes an ostensibly true story which also conforms to a classic movie situation—a man condemned for a crime he did not commit—and allows our expectations to do all the work. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington) was a top middleweight contender in the mid-1960s…

Bad jokes are like rotten apples: it only takes a few of them to spoil the whole barrel. Company Man, a co-written, co-directed effort by Douglas McGrath and Peter Askin, starts off very promisingly. Its jokes are crisp and tart and juicy. But not long into it we take our first bite of the rotten…