Body Heat

Polish Wedding, written and directed by Theresa Connolly is a relentlessly life-affirming story about a Polish family in Hamtramck, Michigan, which undergoes in its own lovably ethnic way several family crises of a sort that sometimes happen to non-Poles too. The incongruously Irish-looking Gabriel Byrne plays Bolek, the paterfamilias, who is being cuckolded by Jadzia…

Here are the good things about The Legend of Bagger Vance, written by Jeremy Leven from the novel by Steven Pressfield and directed by Robert Redford. It tells a story set in Savannah, Georgia, in about 1930 and never once mentions Jim Crow or Southern white racism. So familiar by now is the iconography of…

This well-made French film by Cédric Kahn re-examines the relationship between civilization and savagery. Again.

At one point in Best Laid Plans, written by Ted Griffin and directed by Mike Barker, two recent college graduates have an intellectual conversation as they to the Tropico Recycling plant, where Nick (Alessandro Nivola) works, apparently to dispose of the body of a woman Nick killed. This he had done on behalf of his…

Children of Heaven by the Iranian director, Majid Majidi is a little gem of a film of the sort which the Iranians seem to be good at, though it is a very little gem. When nine year old Ali Mandegar (Mir Farrokh Hashemian) takes the only pair of shoes belonging to his younger sister, Zahra (Bahare…

Hilary and Jackie, directed by Anand Tucker from a screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce and based on the memoir A Genius In the Family by Hilary and Piers du Pré is a guilty pleasure. It is a pleasure because it is marvelously written, acted and directed, but it is a guilty one because a lot…