Shop Around the Corner, The

Little Voice written and directed by Mark Herman from a stage-play by Jim Cartwright is a wonderful movie with an absolutely knockout performance by the eponymous Little Voice or LV (Jane Horrocks) up until its climax. After that, it simply doesn’t know what to do with the situation it has created and peters out in…

The puzzling thing about Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Limey, is the very thing he puts to the fore in it, namely the national origin of its central character. What has that got to do with the basic story of an ex-con who’s “not from around here” pursuing the man he believes to be his…

Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, made in1957 and now restored according to a memo of protest Welles wrote to Universal after they butchered the movie on release, may be the best B-picture ever made. Watching it today, you have to wonder if he knew what he was doing — which was anticipating the postmodern film…

In the first paragraph of his review, of Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s movie, There’s Something about Mary, Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post suggests that the picture is not only brilliantly funny but also one in the eye of those carping critics (presumably those with “artistic” pretensions) who don’t believe that “it is enough for…

Varsity Blues, directed by Brian (Good Burger) Robbins, is yet another in the seemingly endless procession of dumb Hollywood movies designed to attack the masculine virtues and what used to be thought of as the laudable American quality of the will to win. Like Affliction and The Thin Red Line in recent weeks, it seems to…

Neil LaBute’s attempt at a real romance goes — perhaps unsurprisingly — horribly wrong.