When Harry Met Sally

A beautiful if harrowing film about a clash between medieval and modern in which neither looks much like a winner

At the end of A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, as at the end of almost every Merchant-Ivory film I’ve ever seen, I said to myself: “What was the point of that?” I guess it’s a kind of trademark of theirs. In fact, the Soldier’s Daughter, based on a memoir by the daughter of the novelist…

It’s not, unfortunately, The Last Days of Disco, but 54, written and directed by Mark Christopher, covers some of the same ground. Mike Meyers with a nose job stars as Steve Rubell, the legendary club-owner, and Ryan Phillipe is the starry-eyed boy, Shane O’Shea, from New Jersey who comes to the city to make it…

Denys Arcand’s Decline of the American Empire, a sort of French-Canadian Big Chill, has been given a sequel that far out-classes the original

Felicia’s Journey ought to have all the ingredients of a terrific movie. The novel by William Trevor on which it is based is first rate, a haunting study of the banality of evil that sticks in the mind long after it is read. The director, Atom Egoyan, did a fine job with Russell Banks’s The…

[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 25, 2013] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe