Affair to Remember, An

Jason Bourne stands for the exquisite conscience of liberal America which, when geostrategic necessity comes calling, can only cry out that they should have left us alone

Claude Chabrol’s The Bridesmaid (La Demoiselle d’Honneur), which came out in 2004 but is only now finding a release in the US, is a classic Chabrol-type study of the point where passion and madness intersect with ordinary life. Passion is represented by Senta (Laura Smet), who has changed her name from Stéphanie to adopt that…

Le Huitième Jour(The Eighth Day) by Jaco Van Dormael begins with a somewhat whimsical attempt to portray the world as seen through the eyes of Georges (Pascal Duquenne), a Downs syndrome sufferer. Like Genesis (the pop group of the same name makes an appearance later in the film), it begins “In the beginning. . .”…

Krippendorf’s Tribe, directed by Todd Holland, is almost as unfunny a comedy as An Alan Smithee Film. Richard Dreyfuss plays James Krippendorf, a professor of anthropology with three children whose wife has recently died. Prostrated by grief he has shut himself up in the house and lived on his research grant until, one day, a…

This one’s a real winner — if you can bear to watch it.

Hurlyburly directed by Anthony Drazan and written (from his stageplay) by David Rabe has an all-star cast, but it cannot escape from the poverty of its script, in which nothing very much happens (people come and go) and all the characters talk exactly alike—that is in a kind of souped-up psychobabble with an occasionally Pinterian…