Postman Always Rings Twice, The

Excess Baggage, directed by Marco Brambilla but under the creative control of Alicia Silverstone stars the rather pudgy Miss Silverstone as Emily Hope, a poor little rich girl, always getting into trouble, who stages her own kidnapping so that her brute of a father, who is a shady businessman in Seattle who is not overeager…

Star Maps, written and directed by Miguel Arteta, tells the story of Carlos (Douglas Spain) who comes from his grandparents’ house in Mexico, much against his mother’s wishes, to live with the rest of his family in Los Angeles: his father, Pepe (Efraim Figueroa), his mother, Theresa (Martha Velez), his sister, Maria (Lysa Flores) and…

The old stories are always the best. When I saw the trailer for She’s All That, directed by Robert Iscove, I thought: here was a kiddies’ movie that, unlike the dreadful but depressingly popular Varsity Blues, I might not find it quite unbearable to sit through. First, it was a retelling of the Pygmalion story,…

Orphans, written and directed by Peter Mullan — the actor who played the title role in Ken Loach’s My Name is Joe — is a bit of a bore, at least insofar as its purpose is to teach a moral lesson that our times are not exactly desperately in need of. Avoid a rigid and…

Wild Things, directed by John McNaughton and written by Stephen Peters, is superior quality 90s noir — which means, as I have said before, noir without any moral compass whatsoever. It’s too bad because this could have been a good film. It has clever plotting, good dialogue (without being overfull of wisecracks and strained attempts…

A good-hearted Australian movie that just about rises to the level of being worth watching