Annie Hall

The best movie I have seen so far this year is Open Hearts, a Dogme 95 film directed by Susanne Bier from a script she co-wrote with the great Anders Thomas Jensen, who also co-wrote Mifune and The King is Alive, two other Dogme productions that are among the best films of recent years. The…

Dr. T. and the Women is a typical Robert Altman film in being sprawling and incoherent and full of more or less purposeless and unresolved activity, but also typical in showing flashes of brilliance. Nor does it surprise that Altman is going in for a lot of sentimentalizing about women these days, since it gives…

One ought, I think, to be suspicious of films about mental illness. They nearly always call on us to pity and thus to condescend to their characters. Such feelings are not those elicited by great art, which requires us to recognize in the characters an essential likeness to ourselves. But Angel Baby by Michael Rymer,…

There is sometimes a fine line between the pitiless, unflinching gaze that sees things as they are and the impulse to glory in moral squalor. Todd Solondz doesn’t avoid crossing it.

Cosi by Mark Joffe is the perfect Australian movie, containing as it does opera, insanity, coming of age and that most intricate of metaphysical questions: how to resolve the conflict between one’s girl and one’s mates. Based on a play by Louis Nowra, it stars Ben Mendelsohn as Lewis, a young college dropout who doesn’t…

A bit of anti-American propaganda that could have been so much more