Place in the Sun, A

Hard Eight is a brilliant little film by Paul Thomas Anderson, who also wrote the screenplay. It is a retelling (sort of) of Shakespeare’s Tempest set in the seedy but ever-atmospheric world of Nevada gambling dens. It begins with a castaway called John (John C. Reilly), washed up outside “Jack’s Coffee Shop” somewhere along a…

The re-release of Jules Dassin’s Rififi (French title: Du Rififi Chez les Hommes) of 1954 comes opportunely to remind the Hollywood epigoni known to these pages as the Taranteenies of what film noir really was. The chief difference between it and that which too often, and too erroneously, goes under the same name today, is…

A movie that shows how cynicism and sentimentality can be two sides of the same coin

If Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman can’t tell the difference between politics and economics, why should Charles Ferguson be able to do so?

Here is the story of Message in a Bottle, directed by Luis Madoki. A desperately sad widower and boat-builder, the strikingly handsome Garret Blake (Kevin Costner), puts letters to his dead wife in bottles and throws the bottles into the sea. They are found by a beautiful young, unattached single mother called Theresa (Robin Wright…

A bittersweet but well-executed comedy to which there is much more than may at first appear.