Double Indemnity

To the question of why anyone would want to rewrite King Lear so as to make Goneril and Regan the heroines and poor old Lear and (to a lesser extent) Cordelia the villains, there can only be one answer: in order to make a revolutionary statement. Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, now translated to the…

Science fiction is the parent genre of all post-modernism. If, as Hemingway said, all subsequent American fiction arises out of Huckleberry Finn, all post-modern movies arise out of Plan Nine from Outer Space and other B-grade schlock sci-fi movies of the 1950s — movies which have been enjoyed ever since by the cognoscenti more for…

You can tell that Return to Me, co-written and directed by Bonnie Hunt, who also stars in the best friend role, is a chick flick because the car accident in which the beautiful zoo-keeper, Elizabeth Rueland (Joely Richardson), perishes takes place off-screen while the subsequent prostration with grief of her surviving husband, Bob (David Duchovny),…

A haunting documentary that confronts some Khmer Rouge thugs with their victims in an attempt to trace the origins of evil

I thought that the cowboy who loved his horse more than any ole woman went out with Tom Mix, but make him P.C. and he’s back again

Jackie Brown confirms two things we have always really known about Quentin Tarantino at his best (at his worst he is just unspeakable). One is that he is the most compulsively watchable filmmaker now working in America. He knows how to keep an audience riveted to the screen, and he knows how to tell a…