Postman Always Rings Twice, The

Not of this World by Giuseppe Piccioni is, like Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, a life-changing movie, a movie that I would have thought it impossible to watch unmoved, impossible to forget once seen, but for the fact that the New York Times‘s critic called it a “loamy soap opera” and “a melodrama of…

A handsome reproduction of 1970s-era Britain but with a distinctly contemporary revulsion against Cold War style espionage and its practitioners

The thesis of Elizabeth, written by Michael Hirst and directed by Shekhar Kapur, is very simple— like the people that the thesis is ultimately about. These are the credulous peasants of the middle ages who are supposed to have worshiped the Virgin Mary. By the 16th century, the Catholic Church as headed by Sir John…

Hard Eight is a brilliant little film by Paul Thomas Anderson, who also wrote the screenplay. It is a retelling (sort of) of Shakespeare’s Tempest set in the seedy but ever-atmospheric world of Nevada gambling dens. It begins with a castaway called John (John C. Reilly), washed up outside “Jack’s Coffee Shop” somewhere along a…

Boy! I thought this kind of crude, anti-American propaganda went out with the 1970s. A combination of Michael Moore and Bush-hatred appears to have brought it back

Playing God, directed by Andy Wilson and written by Mark Haskell Smith is yet another example of the work of the Taranteenies, those hip young filmmakers who have dominated creative thinking in Hollywood for the past three or four years, in the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s success with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. You’d think…