Postman Always Rings Twice, The

Jailed for arson? Poor Danny! Don’t you know he did it for our vanishing wilderness? Soft-core propaganda from the environmentalist left.

Readers may remember my reservations about the all-but universally praised L.A. Confidential a few months ago — a film which I note continues to garner award after award from less fastidious critics. Yet, thought I, what was the point of a movie in which everybody but a couple of utterly self-absorbed heroes is basically scum?…

An interesting French film that plays around with movie-stereotypes of the police, though it could do more to subvert them

Better wear some flowers in your hair

A Merry War is the American title given to the adaptation by Robert Bierman (director) and Alan Plater (writer) of George Orwell’s sunniest novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying— presumably because Americans don’t know what an aspidistra is. For the record, it is a houseplant with long, leathery swordlike leaves which, in the 1930s was a…

It’s a lucky thing for me that Whit Stillman, who is an old friend of the American Spectator, makes such good movies. If he made bad ones, I should have to be diplomatic, but that is a necessity which has yet to arise. I thought his first film, Metropolitan (1990) was funny, clever and charming….