Postman Always Rings Twice, The

Not that I approve of it myself, but the metaphor of “culture war” would seem to imply two more or less evenly matched forces struggling with might and main to master and destroy or disperse each other. Yet much of what goes under that name is more like culture murder. Even that expression would be…

Deep Impact, directed by Mimi Leder from a script by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, is one of what I take to be a new breed of Hollywood disaster flicks. Modeled on Independence Day, these are apocalyptic in scale, overburdened with special effects and pitched to a younger teen audience, but they are still…

Air Force One by Wolfgang Petersen is a superior example of its kind, the disaster movie cum thriller featuring national security and political issues of a kind that Hollywood invariably gets wrong. This film is no exception. It posits a warlord ruler of Kazakhstan who threatens world peace by turning his desperately poor country into…

The Dinner Game, as the untranslatable Dîner de Cons is awkwardly but decorously rendered, is an uproarious French farce by Francis Veber, co-author of La Cage Aux Folles and creator on his own of a number of other plays and films in a similar style. It tells the story of Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte), a…

Great performances and a skillful evocation of provincial England in the 1960s, but a mean-spirited movie all the same

Perhaps the most unforgettable moment in In and Out (written by Paul Rudnick and directed by Frank Oz) comes as Joan Cusack, having just been jilted at the altar by Kevin Kline, who has picked that moment to decide that he is gay ( “Was there any other time you could have told me this?”…