Public Enemy, The

Readers may remember my reservations about the all-but universally praised L.A. Confidential a few months ago — a film which I note continues to garner award after award from less fastidious critics. Yet, thought I, what was the point of a movie in which everybody but a couple of utterly self-absorbed heroes is basically scum?…

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon directed by the excellent Mr. Ang Lee is a sort of Charlie’s Angels for sophisticates. Good as Mr Lee is, one sometimes finds oneself observing of his films that they are very well done while asking oneself if, after all, they were unquestionably worth doing. So it is with this film,…

Liv Ullmann’s direction of the screenplay of her former director, “mentor” and lover, Ingmar Bergman in Faithless (Trolösa), is remarkably competent—remarkably Bergmanian—in all kind of technical ways, but I wonder if she was fully alive to the subtleties built into this story of a broken marriage? For that matter, I wonder if Bergman himself is?…

Fairy Tale by Charles Sturridge tells the story—sort of—of the fairy-photograph hoax perpetrated by a couple of young girls in Yorkshire in 1917-18. Now if you are going to do this on film, this way of doing it, with a bunch of ostensibly real fairies buzzing about on dragonfly wings, is probably the best way…

Professional wrestling is truly postmodernism in sport, which makes it surprising to me that there have not been more documentaries like Beyond the Mat, directed by Barry Blaustein. This movie, though it is rather badly organized and tries to do too much, contains some marvelous, even unforgettable footage of what life is like behind the…

Like A Merry War, the adaptation of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying that came out last year, Metroland, directed by Philip Saville and adapted by Adrian Hodge from the novel by Julian Barnes, in the end boils down to a pretty banal discovery of the obvious. For some reason, perhaps the historical accident of…