Brief Encounter

In case you hadn’t heard, Hollywood hates and fears religion and wants to make sure that we know all the cool people are unbelievers

Baz Luhrmann, director of Strictly Ballroom and Romeo+ Juliet seems with each film to be trying to outdo the absurdity and outrageousness of the last. If so, he’s going to have a hard time topping Moulin Rouge, which seems to me to go about as far as you can go with self-parody. He is reported…

Polish Wedding, written and directed by Theresa Connolly is a relentlessly life-affirming story about a Polish family in Hamtramck, Michigan, which undergoes in its own lovably ethnic way several family crises of a sort that sometimes happen to non-Poles too. The incongruously Irish-looking Gabriel Byrne plays Bolek, the paterfamilias, who is being cuckolded by Jadzia…

There is a moment in The Wedding Singer, directed by Frank Coraci to a script by Tim Herlihy, that summed the picture up for me. After Robbie Hart (Adam Sandler) is stood up at his own wedding by the vixenish Linda (Angela Featherstone), he can’t bear to go near a wedding again, so he has…

Every few years around Christmas time, Steven Spielberg feels the need to trot out his social conscience for public examination. Four years ago it was Schindler’s List, a film designed to show how bad the Holocaust was. This year it is Amistad—the story of a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish ship in 1839 which created…

Absolute Power is a typical product of the Clint Eastwood line of knock-off existentialist heroes: a vehicle, that is, for yet another mythologization of the high-plains-drifter/man-with-no-name anti-hero whom neither old Clint nor his devoted audience ever seems to get tired of. I got tired of it myself a long time ago, so I should probably…