When Harry Met Sally

Dancing at Lughnasa, written by Frank McGuinness from play by Brian Friel and directed by Pat O’Connor, stars Marvelous Meryl Streep doing a vowel-perfect Irish accent as Kate Mundy, a severe old maid and schoolmistress who is trying to hold together her little family in Ireland in the 1930s. The family consists of her four…

Trust Merchant-Ivory to find a way to transform the elegant and the sophisticated into the banal

The Pillow Book by Peter Greenaway is a typical Greenaway blend of the bizarre, the disgusting and the boring. Especially the boring. You wouldn’t think it, would you? That a man could concentrate so exclusively on weird sexual fetishes (in this case, a woman’s desire to have her body written on — and then to…

Romeo Must Die, directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak, is a movie for martial arts enthusiasts featuring the grim and scary-looking Jet Li, allowed to play the good guy for once, as Han, a one-man enforcer of peace on rival gangs in Oakland, California. It is also a variant of the Romeo and Juliet story, as Han…

Capitaine Conan by Bertrand Tavernier has endured the sort of distribution hell which is the fate of most foreign films, even the best, in this country—which is why I have only just got round to seeing it. But if you are lucky enough to be near where it is playing, do go and see it….

A funny and rather touching return to one of the great screen traditions of yesteryear — and one of the few that hasn’t been spoiled by ‘toonery