Affair to Remember, An

The End of Violence, directed by Wim Wenders and written by Nicholas Klein is a frequently enjoyable film in which, however, there is far too much going on, an excess of Germanic portentousness and a hackneyed narrative premiss involving a vast governmental conspiracy (ho-hum) against the people. On the symbolic level the film is about…

20 Dates by Myles Berkowitz is a charming little pseudo-documentary about what happened when the author, an impecunious independent filmmaker, unexpectedly got $60,000 to produce a film “combining my two biggest failures, my personal life and my professional life.” His gimmick is to be his own star and to go out on 20 dates, recording…

Only a child of the 1960s could have thought of the idea of trying to make Bob Crane into a tragic hero — or come as close as Paul Schrader does to succeeding.

Pay it Forward by Mimi Leder is meant to be another in what I take to be a new series of heart-tugging, inspirational tales like Music of the Heart or American Beauty (which also starred Kevin Spacey) that derive their oomph from the assumption that life in America is pretty grim and miserable but that…

Besieged, like so many other films by its director, Bernardo Bertolucci, is dramatically simple and visually complex. More than any other director working today, Bertolucci is a story-teller in pictures, which makes for striking and memorable images that are forever bursting out of their contexts and becoming saucily incoherent, at least in any kind of…

The mythology of the Vietnam War is as fixed and immutable as that of the Trojan War, at least so far as the Hollywood left are concerned. Will flattering them get Michael Caine an Oscar?