Shop Around the Corner, The

A parable or fairy tale of social renewal from the master cinematic chronicler of the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie

Cosi by Mark Joffe is the perfect Australian movie, containing as it does opera, insanity, coming of age and that most intricate of metaphysical questions: how to resolve the conflict between one’s girl and one’s mates. Based on a play by Louis Nowra, it stars Ben Mendelsohn as Lewis, a young college dropout who doesn’t…

A heart-warming but rather self-congratulatory look backward at the people of 1947, few of whom could be said to come up to our high standards

House of Sand (Casa de Areia), by the Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington from a screenplay by Elena Soárez, is a woman’s picture, set in a masculine — indeed, a heroic — landscape which dwarfs the men and animals making their painful way across it in the opening scenes. What we see are the wild and…

Nettoyage à Sec (Dry Cleaning) by Anne Fontaine presents us with a French version of that now familiar Hollywood trope, merely gestured towards in 8mm, the capacity for sexual adventurism and even perversion in all of us. Nicole (Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie (Charles Berling) have been married for 15 years and run a dry-cleaning establishment in…

Men in Black, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld from the comic book by Lowell Cunningham, is offered as a justification for weird sort of benign paranoia. The government, we are asked to believe, really knows all about the alien presence in our midst (that much is familiar) but they are keeping the knowledge of it from…