Postman Always Rings Twice, The

Twin Dragons, starring Jackie Chan and directed by Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam is a huge disappointment. Regular readers will know that I am a Chan fan, but although it was made some years ago in Hong Kong, this movie looks like one made to suit a big star who has too much creative control…

Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol is one of those hokey “futuristic” flicks which is really a form of pandering to a very present-day paranoia. It does not exactly require a huge leap of imagination to project a “not-too-distant future” in which gene-typing has become so swift and reliable that state security will have…

A charming and funny moral tale which rises above its lightness and slightness to entertain as the movies used to entertain

. . .And, speaking of propaganda, there can be few more spectacular recent examples of the same than Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane. Here is a film which has no single bit of characterization or plotting or dialogue which is not designed solely to persuade us that putting women into combat is right and reasonable and…

Sensitive writers rendered dysfunctional by their dysfunctional families — hm, where have we heard something like that before?

Dr. T. and the Women is a typical Robert Altman film in being sprawling and incoherent and full of more or less purposeless and unresolved activity, but also typical in showing flashes of brilliance. Nor does it surprise that Altman is going in for a lot of sentimentalizing about women these days, since it gives…