Apartment, The

Hélas! The good-humored detachment and optimism that François Truffaut brought to the French cinema seems to have died with him. Barring the rare exception, like last year’s Un Air de Famille by Cédric Klappisch, each new French film that manages to get itself released in this country seems to try to outdo the last in…

The impulse behind this multicultural French film is a good one, but the translation makes it sound as if these French high school kids were trying, and failing, to talk in Ebonics

The original was pretty dire, but the re-make is unspeakably awful

Shakespeare in Love, which was directed by John Madden from a screenplay co-written by Tom Stoppard, has all the signs of the high Stoppardian style, including lots of puns and Elizabethan English transplanted to unexpected situations, where it takes on new and usually humorous meanings. And not only Elizabethan words either. At one point we…

Hélas! The good-humored detachment and optimism that François Truffaut brought to the French cinema seems to have died with him. Barring the rare exception, like last year’s Un Air de Famille by Cédric Klappisch, each new French film that manages to get itself released in this country seems to try to outdo the last in…

The impulse behind this multicultural French film is a good one, but the translation makes it sound as if these French high school kids were trying, and failing, to talk in Ebonics

The original was pretty dire, but the re-make is unspeakably awful

Shakespeare in Love, which was directed by John Madden from a screenplay co-written by Tom Stoppard, has all the signs of the high Stoppardian style, including lots of puns and Elizabethan English transplanted to unexpected situations, where it takes on new and usually humorous meanings. And not only Elizabethan words either. At one point we…

Josh and Jonas Pate, co-directors of Deceiver, have all the vices of the Coen brothers—mainly pretentiousness and self-conscious artiness—without any of the virtues. Their film is not funny and not even particularly intelligent, although it tries very hard to be the latter. So much so, indeed, that the three main characters are introduced to us…