Affair to Remember, An

Another unsuccessful attempt at the movie that tried to identify Death with Fate and got tangled up in its own metaphysics. But several accidental demises are very cool.

With the help of a black ex-con, Dad becomes a hip, freaky, fun-loving guy and his wife and kids are overjoyed. Best of all, he gets to keep the Mercedes and the job as a high-priced tax lawyer.

Gekko No Sasayaki or “Moonlight Whispers” is a brilliant little Japanese film, written and directed by Akihiko Shiota, about young love which suddenly spins out of control and becomes sexual perversion. Not a very promising subject, you might think, and the quasi-clinical dimension of the film, though it has a serious point to make, is…

Love is the Devil written and directed by John Maybury, stars Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon, the pioneer of the skull-beneath-the-skin school of British art. Because he was forbidden by keepers of the Bacon artistic estate to show actual Bacon canvases on screen, Maybury, who is himself a painter, has had to confine himself to…

My Life So Far, directed by Hugh Hudson from a memoir called Son of Adam by Sir Denis Forman, former director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is rather slight but utterly charming. Lit with the soft backglow of memory, it presents the Oedipal conflict between young Fraser Pettigrew (Robert Norman) and his eccentric…

Smilla’s Sense of Snow, based on the novel by Peter Hoeg and directed by Bille August from a screenplay by Ann Biderman, is another film in which far too much is going on. At its most basic, it is about the search by the beautiful young Smilla (Julia Ormond) for the murderer of a six…