When Harry Met Sally

It is, I believe, always a mistake to criticize a movie for not being the book it is based on—or, indeed, for not being anything at all. Every artist deserves the courtesy of being assessed on the basis of what he tried to do and not on that of what he didn’t try to do….

The Girl on the Bridge (La Fille sur le Pont), written by Serge Frydman and directed by Patrice Leconte, I take to be a sort of parable or allegory of married love. In order to accentuate its rather spooky and tangential relation to reality, it is shot in black and white and makes use of…

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…

An often funny revenge fantasy for wronged women which either doesn’t know about or can’t allow itself to show its more serious side

M by Fritz Lang, first made in 1931, has now been reissued in a new and refurbished print and is a film which movie buffs all ought to rush out to see. The use of the camera and the visual imagery and composition in this story of what we should nowadays call a serial killer,…

. . . And now Lewis Schwarzberg raises the question: does being a patriot require you to be a sentimentalist as well?