Affair to Remember, An

At its best, Olivier Assayas’s film, Irma Vep (an anagram of Vampire) is rather difficult for an American audience, unfamiliar with the classic French silent film Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade (1915), to understand, since so much of it depends on playing off that kind of innocence, but the appallingly poor English pronunciation of Jean…

Way back in 1976, Alan Parker had the clever idea of making use of the venerable satirical form of the mock heroic and applying it to gangster movies. This he did by making, in Bugsy Malone, a basic gangster flick in which children were cast in all the roles, from tough-guy killers to hard-eyed hookers….

There are several things to like in Armageddon, directed by Michael Bay. One is that the sympathetic main character, Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), is a wildcat oil-driller who is introduced to us as he harasses a Greenpeace ship which has been sent to harass his offshore drilling platform by hitting golf balls at it. The…

[Also see discussion in “Entry from July 27, 2011” under “My Diary”] I liked After Life by Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose previous film was Maborosi. It is a witty contribution to the genre that includes Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Stairway to Heaven and so forth, but it gives the bureaucracy of death a peculiarly Japanese look….

Blue Streak, directed by Les Mayfield, reminded me a little of the extremely disturbing Austrian film, Funny Games, reviewed here last year, in that it leads us up the garden path of cinematic convention, then whirls around and cries: “Only kidding!” Nothing is what we thought it was. But where Michael Haneke, the sadist responsible…

Mel, we may love you for the enemies you’ve made, but your movie is still a mess