Annie Hall

Roman Polanski always makes you want to watch what he is doing on the screen, but The Ninth Gate shows that he is hopeless when it comes to story-telling. This story is a mess, even if you allow for the fact that it is all about Satanism and witchcraft and conjuring up the devil and…

[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 3, 2013] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Liar Liar is another high-concept movie, this one directed by Tom Shadyac, who also directed Jim Carrey’s breakthrough film, Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. Here Carrey appears as Fletcher Reede, a shyster lawyer whose five year old son, Max (Justin Cooper) makes a birthday wish that, just for one day, his father cannot tell a lie….

Adrian Lyne is shockingly unfaithful to Claude Chabrol’s masterpiece, La Femme Infidèle, giving adultery the Oprah treatment.

Going All the Way, directed by Mark Pellington, to a screenplay adapted by Dan Wakefield from his own novel is yet another among the plethora of recent cinematic evocations of the 1950s—and one which, I would have thought, might have elicited one or two protests from women because of the way that it treats them…

Conceptual art comes to the movies, bringing with it a newish sort of excuse for watching pornography