Place in the Sun, A

The Astronaut’s Wife, by Rand Ravich, is like the Alien movies in being a kind of mythologization of modern female insecurities about sex and childbearing. Commander Spencer Armacost (Johnny Depp) is a mystery from the beginning. Apparently deeply attached to his wife, Jillian (Charlize Theron), to the point of uxoriousness, he is also very much…

The Skulls is a movie about a secret, all-male society at Yale which hardly even attempts to disguise the fact that it is based on Skull and Bones, an élite group whose membership is said to include both the George Bushes. So, too, “The Skulls” in the movie go around saying to each other “a…

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, directed by Clint Eastwood from John Berendt’s best seller stars John Cusack as John Kelso, a journalist sent to Savannah by Town and Country magazine to cover one of the highlights of the social season there, a Christmas party given by Mr Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey). But…

A lovely film from the author of Gomorrah that explores, with humor but little hope, the God-shaped hole in the life of our culture

Maybe I’m growing tired and jaded from seeing large numbers of mediocre movies, but more and more I find that the best I can say of a romantic comedy is that it’s not so bad as I expected it to be. This is certainly true of Someone Like You, primary responsibility for which belongs to…

Way back in 1976, Alan Parker had the clever idea of making use of the venerable satirical form of the mock heroic and applying it to gangster movies. This he did by making, in Bugsy Malone, a basic gangster flick in which children were cast in all the roles, from tough-guy killers to hard-eyed hookers….