Shop Around the Corner, The

It’s nice to know, as I’m sure I’ve said before, that somewhere in the world life on celluloid is still an earnest business and not a sly, postmodern in-joke as it has so largely become in the pampered West. You might have to go to China, however, still not recovered from nearly 50 years of…

So let me get this straight. The sleazy boyfriend (Viggo Mortensen) of the stunning sex- goddess Gwyneth Paltrow, an unhappy wife with a hundred million dollars in her butter-and- egg jar, is going to use this desperate woman — as he has used many desperate and lonely women before — to make half a million…

Blue Streak, directed by Les Mayfield, reminded me a little of the extremely disturbing Austrian film, Funny Games, reviewed here last year, in that it leads us up the garden path of cinematic convention, then whirls around and cries: “Only kidding!” Nothing is what we thought it was. But where Michael Haneke, the sadist responsible…

A serious man maybe, but not a serious movie

OK, so old people can be as sexually licentious as young and attractive ones. Does this mean that we want to watch them doing it?

Putting together the pieces of the puzzle is the only pleasure to be had from this movie, but it is pleasure enough for some people.