Body Heat

The gay fantasy of sex divorced from sin is superimposed on a community of Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles

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…

The Franco-German director Dominik Moll’s new film is called Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Veut du Bien, which means, “Harry, a friend who only wants the best for you.” For its American release it has been given the slightly misleading English title of With A Friend Like Harry. . ., but in other English-speaking countries…

There are two transcendent moments in the Autumn Tale, the fourth and perhaps best of Eric Rohmer’s magisterial “Tales of the Four Seasons.” The first is when we suddenly realize that the simple story of two women, married Isabelle (Marie Rivière) and her divorced friend Magali (Béatrice Romand), whom she is trying to fix up…

The best comment on Howard Stern’s Private Parts came in the New Yorker cartoon that showed one rueful movie-goer saying to the other: “I think I hate liking Howard Stern even more than I liked hating him.” Here he presents himself, with the help of Betty (Brady Bunch) Thomas, as just a good old-fashioned, all-American…

After 50 years, the re-make of a classic western provides us with a pretty accurate gauge of the degree to which the culture has been debased since 1957