Body Heat

It cannot have escaped the notice of my readers that a favorite trope of liberals and other lefties — who more often call themselves “progressives” these days — is that all conservatism is just reflexive resistance to change, and that conservative political proposals are ipso facto designed with the more or less deliberate aim in…

Kenneth Branagh’s new film of Love’s Labour’s Lost has very little to do with the play of the same name by William Shakespeare. Branagh’s marketability (such as it is) has always been pretty closely tied to that of the 16th century playwright, but here he is shamelessly using the Shakespeare brand name simply in order…

The Skulls is a movie about a secret, all-male society at Yale which hardly even attempts to disguise the fact that it is based on Skull and Bones, an élite group whose membership is said to include both the George Bushes. So, too, “The Skulls” in the movie go around saying to each other “a…

One star for Ron Howard’s attempt to bring back an old-fashioned, unhip hero who seems to have come from the moon rather than New Jersey

It was an interesting experience to go to see Kevin Spacey’s Albino Alligator with Jackie Chan’s First Strike fresh in my mind. The two films stand at opposite poles: the one delightfully fresh and uncomplicated and entirely based on its swift, non-stop movement and the other slow and lugubrious and full of portentous dialogue and…

Re-make fever strikes again, and with even more lamentable results than usual. Will someone please stop Kenneth Branagh before he directs again?