Shop Around the Corner, The

It was an interesting experience to go to see Kevin Spacey’s Albino Alligator with Jackie Chan’s First Strike fresh in my mind. The two films stand at opposite poles: the one delightfully fresh and uncomplicated and entirely based on its swift, non-stop movement and the other slow and lugubrious and full of portentous dialogue and…

The Cider House Rules, directed by Lasse Hallström, is the inspiring tale of an abortionist, Dr. Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine), and his long life of tireless, unselfish, devoted service to unwanted children in an orphanage in New England in the early part of the century—when, of course, he was forced to ply his trade illegally….

Are even the French beginning to get a little tired of existential angst? See Yann Samuell’s movie and judge for yourself

What Planet Are You From? is a charming progressive fable about the female domestication of wild masculinity that will appeal on different levels to those, like its director Mike Nichols, who wish that it might be so and to those who fear that it is so. For everybody else, there is the pleasure of the…

Never a big fan of the late Stanley Kubrick’s, I went to see Eyes Wide Shut with no very great expectations. As in so many of Kubrick’s films, the cineaste predominates over the dramatist or the moralist. He is one of those directors — Bertolucci is another — whose approach to the movies is what…

Yet another example of gore, black humor and special effects that only has contempt for the non-special but desirable effect of explaining what is going on