Double Indemnity

Passion of Mind is the first film in English of Alain Berliner, the director of the charmingly disturbing or, disturbingly charming, Belgian film Ma Vie en Rose. Perhaps it was decided that for his American debut he needed to find his audience with the help of a star of the stature of Demi Moore. Similar…

A bit of anti-American propaganda that could have been so much more

Somewhere near the end of The Insider, written by Eric Roth and directed by Michael Mann, we overhear a TV announcer talking about “a fraud perpetrated on the American people”—by which he means the tobacco companies’ concealment from public view of what they know of the harm caused by their product. But the real fraud…

Here is the story of Message in a Bottle, directed by Luis Madoki. A desperately sad widower and boat-builder, the strikingly handsome Garret Blake (Kevin Costner), puts letters to his dead wife in bottles and throws the bottles into the sea. They are found by a beautiful young, unattached single mother called Theresa (Robin Wright…

Bean—without the Mr. usually appended to his name in the series of delightful comedy shorts featuring the character created by Rowan Atkinson—has now been stretched out to feature length in a version directed by Mel Smith, Atkinson’s former colleague on the BBC’s hit satirical revue of the early ’80s, “Not the Nine O’Clock News.” He…

Aren’t there enough reasons we know about to oppose the President’s re-election without our having to probe his psyche for hidden ones?