Brief Encounter

Pay it Forward by Mimi Leder is meant to be another in what I take to be a new series of heart-tugging, inspirational tales like Music of the Heart or American Beauty (which also starred Kevin Spacey) that derive their oomph from the assumption that life in America is pretty grim and miserable but that…

The problem isn’t that a 40-year-old woman seduces a 15-year-old boy, it’s that the seduction is not even considered morally problematical.

Only a child of the 1960s could have thought of the idea of trying to make Bob Crane into a tragic hero — or come as close as Paul Schrader does to succeeding.

The fine Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar employs his talents unworthily on behalf of propaganda for “the right to die”

Like the Iliad, Biker Boyz — directed by Reggie Rock Bythewood from a screenplay he co-wrote with Craig Fernandez and based on an article by Michael Gougis in New Times magazine — presents us with the theatre of raw masculinity. Also like the Iliad it depicts a series of stylized taunts and scenes of individual…

Volker Schlöndorff’s film, The Legend of Rita has many virtues, not the least of them being a wonderfully watchable leading lady in Bibiana Beglau. She is a sort of Communist version of Betjeman’s wonderful tennis girls of suburban England: beautiful, strong-limbed, confident and somehow both terrifying and lovable at the same time. She plays the…