When Harry Met Sally

As Enchanted April showed a few years ago, Italy is the promised land for the cold, sexually-repressed, work- obsessed Englishman or, more likely, Englishwoman. At least it is for the English who imagine themselves as having been kitted out by their climate or their religion or their national character with such a load of what…

A movie better avoided by anyone with any taste is nevertheless extremely funny — and it has something serious to say

The Mighty directed by Peter Chelsom and based on the novel by Rodman Philbrick, is at least an improvement annoying Simon Birch of last month, though it uses essentially the same device: doomed crippled kid who is nevertheless smart as a whip (I have known a lot of crippled kids, by the way, and never…

Like its predecessor, Toy Story 2 is a triumph of technology — the relatively new technology of computer animation — if not of moviemaking. In fact, as a kind of technological marvel it is naturally impervious to criticism on any merely airy-fairy, aesthetic grounds. Like the Bond films with which it might otherwise be thought…

The Newton Boys directed by Richard Linklater is the sort of movie that Hollywood made routinely 25 or 30 years ago, a movie about criminals as existential heroes—decent fellows no worse than lots of respectable folks who, though equally ready to be corrupted, haven’t the guts to go out and say “stick ’em up” as…

American Psycho is as a movie as it was as a book, not a serious work of art but merely something designed to be talked about in the media and thus to confer money and celebrity upon its now plural authors. This is important, because not all books or movies that are talked about in…