Postman Always Rings Twice, The

The movie version of the scatological TV series, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, directed by Trey Parker from a script he co-wrote with Matt Stone and Pam Brady, is billed as satire, but it has no coherent satirical vision. In fact, it cannot even remember what, if anything, it is supposed to be satirical…

An often funny movie which will nearly as often make you feel at least a little ashamed for laughing at it

Thieves by André Téchiné, is one of those films where the artistic means completely overpower the narrative ends. Here we have multiple narrators, shifts backward and forward in time, several brooding, complex, mysterious characters and a tangle of unexplained plot details trailing off into philosophical conversations full of gnomic utterance. And all for what? To…

Follow your bliss, middle-aged America! Quit your job, speak your mind, buy that muscle car you’ve always wanted. Start smoking pot again. Buff up and start an affair with a teenage girl. You may die for it, but you will die happy. Where have we heard this before? Periodically, the popular culture becomes receptive to…

Judy Berlin by Eric Mendelsohn is chiefly worth seeing for the performance of Edie Falco (Carmela Soprano on the HBO’s series about New Jersey gangsters) in the title role, and for its affectionate portrait of suburban Long Island, though nothing much happens in it. Also notable is the performance of the late Madeline Kahn in…

I really wanted to like Mouse Hunt, which was officially directed by Gore Verbinski but unfortunately bears the hallmarks of the directorial style of Steven Spielberg, out of whose “Dreamworks” studio it comes. Every now and then, it is true, the skills of the comic duo of Nathan Lane and Lee Evans as the brothers…