Place in the Sun, A

Wide Awake, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, must have attracted its stars — Denis Leary, Dana Delaney and Rosie O’Donnell, all of whom are badly miscast — because it tells what purports to be a heartwarming story of a kid in Catholic school, presumably of Irish extraction, who has to come to terms with his…

The Spanish Prisoner, written and directed by David Mamet, gives expression to a refined kind of paranoia born of what we might call sophistication-anxiety. This results in the common assumption among contemporary writers, artists and (especially) filmmakers — see, for example, the recent movies Wild Things and L.A. Confidential — that everything must be different…

Who, I wonder, is the intended audience for movies like Thirteen Days? Of course we know who it is that makes them. Kevin Costner, in spite of a string of self-indulgent flops is still a big enough star to be allowed to indulge himself a bit further. And of course when two or three are…

A moving portrayal of a little-known passage of recent history which even manages to make us forget why it was, until now, little known

A bit of anti-American propaganda that could have been so much more

Anaconda by Luis Llosa is a riot of special effects but as dramatically negligible as you would expect. If you haven’t seen it, see if you can answer the following questions about it. 1. The expedition up the Amazon is (a) to shoot big game, (b) to capture big snakes to sell to zoos, (c)…