Bonnie and Clyde

Earlier this year, in a review of Panic by Henry Bromell, I observed that it was possible to appreciate a film which is an impressive bit of propaganda for a political position with which you profoundly disagree. Just think of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will. Nowadays, the most assiduous ideologues among film-makers are…

A remarkably sympathetic portrayal of the early life of St. Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei — though it gains nothing from being tangled up with a fictional romance

It would be presumptuous of me to review Return With Honor, a documentary directed by Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders, who also co-wrote it with Christine Z. Wiser. Both the writing and the direction are quite unobtrusive, and the picture consists almost entirely of interviews with American prisoners of war, most of them Navy…

A couple of months ago I picked Stigmata the front-runner in the Worst-Movie-of-the Year Stakes, but Kevin Smith’s disastrously awful Dogma has now blown by it in the stretch and is cantering towards the finish several lengths ahead of the field. Since his promising debut with Clerks (1994), Smith has been going steadily downhill in…

Here’s one for the hope chest, gals: a husband who won’t mind very much if you cheat on him

In his previous film, Read My Lips (Sur Mes Lèvres), of 2001, the director Jacques Audiard presented us with a Sartrean hymn to criminality as the route to personal authenticity and moral and existential purity, so it is not surprising that he should have seen in a remake of James Toback’s Fingers (1978) an opportunity…