Annie Hall

A star vehicle for Glenn Close that also scores progressivist points for importing today’s gender-bending ideas into Victorian times

The Opportunists by Myles Connell is a pleasant surprise. To some extent, it represents a throwback to the good old days in Hollywood when even the most hard-boiled gangster movies, or movies later taken to have glorified the criminal life, could be relied upon to portray a moral world characterized by inflexible certainty about what…

Lawn Dogs directed by John Duigan from a screenplay by Naomi Wallace is the worst movie I have seen since Fried Green Tomatoes. It touches reality at no point. Next to this piece of cinematic offal, Godzilla or Deep Impact look like kitchen sink realism. I don’t mind the mindlessness of such popcorn movies. They…

The Newton Boys directed by Richard Linklater is the sort of movie that Hollywood made routinely 25 or 30 years ago, a movie about criminals as existential heroes—decent fellows no worse than lots of respectable folks who, though equally ready to be corrupted, haven’t the guts to go out and say “stick ’em up” as…

In The Memory of a Killer, also known as The Alzheimer Case (De Zaak Alzheimer), Erik Van Looy has done a nice job of putting together an engaging, high-concept thriller. But once we’ve finished being caught up in it, we can’t help noticing that the high-concept pretty much goes to waste. It is this. A…

The Replacement Killers, directed by Antoine Fuqua, stars Chow Yun-Fat as John Lee, a kind of Chinese version of the decent American everyman as noir hero of the 1940s — a world-weary Humphrey Bogart, say, who is capable of all criminality but for some reason draws the line at killing a kid, in this case…