Shop Around the Corner, The

Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl, directed by Joan Chen stars the beautiful young actress Lu Lu as the title character, a girl living with her happy family in Chengdu during the Chinese Cultural Revolution who is ordered, along with eight million other teenagers from the cities during the years 1966-76, to “go down” into…

. . .And, speaking of propaganda, there can be few more spectacular recent examples of the same than Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane. Here is a film which has no single bit of characterization or plotting or dialogue which is not designed solely to persuade us that putting women into combat is right and reasonable and…

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…

Mr Jealousy directed by Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming) is the kind of film that young filmmakers ought to be making, and that I approve of in theory. But I’m afraid it is just not very good. The jokes in this would-be romantic comedy for the ’90s fall mostly short of being funny, the characters…

If I should happen to mention that the music in Mon Homme by Bertrand Blier consists entirely of selections by Barry White and Henryk Gorecki, you may get some idea of what a mess the picture is. At one level, it is, as are many of Blier’s earlier films, a masculine fantasy. The heroine is…

The Family Man, written by David Diamond and David Weissman and directed by Brett Ratner, is an attempt at a reverse It’s a Wonderful Life for the Christmases of the new millennium. Jack Campbell (Nicholas Cage) is a high-flying Wall Street whiz kid and swinging bachelor whose angel (played by Don Cheadle) lets him see…