Place in the Sun, A

An ambivalent portrait of Ralph Nader contains a lesson for us all

Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown could be said to be a loving, autumnal tribute to the two great passions of its director’s life outside of the cinema, namely, jazz and psychotherapy. True, the movie contains no scenes involving therapy, nor even any reference to it, but its subtext is the fundamental therapeutic assumption of vulgar…

Dark City by Alex Proyas is another example of the triumph of image over drama which has made postmodern movies what they are and, I believe, will someday be seen to have devastated the capacity of Hollywood to produce quality films. For drama, that is, there must be rules. Some things can happen and some…

Mira Nair’s movie, with its Robert-Altman-goes-to-New-Delhi panorama of Indian life, means to be a feel-good movie. But who wants to feel good?

Yet another nostalgic invocation of the hippie dream, though at least this one doesn’t pretend to be sexually innocent

Devil’s Advocate, directed by Taylor Hackford to a script by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy, is like Playing God in being a Hollywood version of the Faust legend. It is a more theologically sophisticated one, if ultimately no more successful. Al Pacino plays the devil under the name of “John Milton”—perhaps because this film comes…