Fargo

Another autumnal triumph from the world’s greatest living film director.

[See “How Hollywood Lost Its Romantic Groove,” The Wall Street Journal of February 9th, 2007, under “Articles”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

The Postman by Kevin Costner was made about 25 years too late. This is the kind of thing that would have seemed “deep,” or possibly “heavy” to the drugged-out hippies of the Vietnam era, but is just laughable now. Even the audience of film critics I saw it with laughed out loud at several of…

“She was too good for this life. . .” wrote Philip Larkin of the graffiti-covered bathing beauty on the advertising poster for “Sunny Prestatyn” and his ironic pity came to mind as I watched Gillian Anderson piling up the pathos as Lily Bart in Terence Davies’s screen adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of…

A ridiculous bit of wish-fulfilment nevertheless suggests that family values may no longer be considered box-office poison.

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort—which the American distributors are translating as The Young Girls of Rochefort—was directed by the late Jacques Demy in 1967 and now appears recut and restored by Demy’s widow, Agnes Varda. It is a strange—indeed, sometimes hilariously weird—but oddly charming French attempt at a Hollywood musical which stars the young Catherine Deneuve…