Philadelphia Story, The

Regeneration directed by Gillies Mackinnon from a screenplay by Allan Scott and based on the novel by Pat Barker is another retelling of the great left wing myth to come out of the Great War: that it was all the generals’ fault. “Half the seed of Europe,” to use Wilfred Owen’s angry poetic formulation, were…

Chicks behind bars — how can that not be titillating? Liz Garbus has found a way to make it positively dull

At a certain age, almost everyone is inclined to see his mother as a suffering saint and his father as a bully and a tyrant. It is a part of the process of growing up and corresponds with a youth’s period of greatest need to declare independence him- or herself from the paternal tie. It…

Taste of Cherry by the Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, is not for those whose idea of movie fun is explosions and shootings, yet its concerns with matters of life and death are no less exigent for that. Over the opening credits, Mr Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) is cruising in his Range Rover, peering intently at knots…

A remarkably compassionate and non-ideological portrayal of moral and social breakdown

It was an interesting experience to go to see Kevin Spacey’s Albino Alligator with Jackie Chan’s First Strike fresh in my mind. The two films stand at opposite poles: the one delightfully fresh and uncomplicated and entirely based on its swift, non-stop movement and the other slow and lugubrious and full of portentous dialogue and…