Place in the Sun, A

So far, the strongest contender for worst movie of the year has got to be Stigmata, written by Tom Lazarus and Rick Ramage and directed by Rupert Wainwright. Not only does it make explicit — and almost unbelievably crass — Hollywood’s characteristically anti-religious bent, but its advocacy of an alternative spirituality is laughably clumsy, a…

What a lot of fantastical narrative machinery is employed to make an embarrassingly banal point

A moving but ultimately unsatisfying study of a child’s sense of loss and abandonment

Pay it Forward by Mimi Leder is meant to be another in what I take to be a new series of heart-tugging, inspirational tales like Music of the Heart or American Beauty (which also starred Kevin Spacey) that derive their oomph from the assumption that life in America is pretty grim and miserable but that…

Ed Burns, a born movie-star rather than an actor, is a confirmed narcissist and therefore the last man in the world to be playing a confidence man

Beyond Silence, directed by Caroline Link, is one of those tremendously worthy films that deal with handicap and that one had better not say anything bad about because of their great sensitivity and caring. But they illustrate a saying of George Lucas, the director of Star Wars etc, that “emotionally involving the audience is easy….