Body Heat

There are a lot of things wrong with Howard Deutch’s new film, The Replacements, beginning with the fact that it is a football movie and therefore, in my view, extremely limited in its scope for originality. But it is just about worth seeing. There are some good jokes — I especially liked the one where…

A real train-wreck of a movie from which, nevertheless, we may learn something

Philip Kaufman’s Quills, based on a play by Doug Wright, who wrote the screenplay, is a perfect illustration of the fact, which I may have mentioned once or twice before in these reviews, that it is now impossible for Hollywood to make a movie about sex which is not at the same time propaganda for…

It is fascinating how, although Hollywood has implicitly believed in every crackpot conspiracy theory for decades and has been willing to attribute to the democratically elected government of the United States any and all perfidies, it retains a sentimental attachment to the idea of the presidency. The image of the good king dies hard in…

Ma Vie en Rose or My Life in Pink by Alain Berliner manages to be a charming film, rather in the manner of the upbeat and jokey postmodernism of Berliner’s fellow Belgian, Jaco Van Dormael. Enjoyable as it is in many ways, however, one can never quite lose the sense of being got at by—that…

Addicted to Love, written by Robert Gordon and directed by Griffin Dunne has its moments of humor but it never really seems to understand the seriousness of the issue it is playing with. This is the issue of revenge. Maggie (Meg Ryan) has been dumped by Anton (Tcheky Karyo), who has since moved on to…