Bonnie and Clyde

In The Hurricane, Norman Jewison is going through the motions. His film takes an ostensibly true story which also conforms to a classic movie situation—a man condemned for a crime he did not commit—and allows our expectations to do all the work. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington) was a top middleweight contender in the mid-1960s…

[See “Entry from June 27, 2007” under “My Diary”]   Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Buddy by Caroline Thompson is the (more or less) true story of Gertrude Lintz (Rene Russo), a Brooklyn socialite of the 1920s and 30s and author of Animals Are My Hobby, who raised chimpanzees as if they were children with some interesting results and later tried the same trick with a gorilla (the eponymous Buddy,…

You have to start watching right at the beginning of La Cérémonie, Claude Chabrol’s latest addition to one of the oddest and most compelling bodies of cinematic work in the world. Why does the maid, Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), answer the questions of her would-be employer, Catherine Lelièvre (Jacqueline Bisset) in that odd way? Why is…

Another illustration of the melancholy truth that you can’t get a quart into a pint pot — or, perhaps, a Victorian novel into a Hollywood film.

The Replacement Killers, directed by Antoine Fuqua, stars Chow Yun-Fat as John Lee, a kind of Chinese version of the decent American everyman as noir hero of the 1940s — a world-weary Humphrey Bogart, say, who is capable of all criminality but for some reason draws the line at killing a kid, in this case…