Fargo

Liv Ullmann’s direction of the screenplay of her former director, “mentor” and lover, Ingmar Bergman in Faithless (Trolösa), is remarkably competent—remarkably Bergmanian—in all kind of technical ways, but I wonder if she was fully alive to the subtleties built into this story of a broken marriage? For that matter, I wonder if Bergman himself is?…

The best movie version of a Bible story that I have seen

Beaumarchais: The Scoundrel, directed by Edouard Molinaro from an unpublished play by Sacha Guitry has a Cyrano-like panache to it and is mostly quite enjoyable—though it is still worth remembering what Fabrice Luchini, in the title role, says to Manuel Blanc, the star-struck young Gudin who complains that the actors are pronouncing his words too…

Fred Barnes, writing in The Weekly Standard, tells us that he doesn’t go to the movies anymore, partly because he has got out of the habit and partly because they start too late or too early but mainly because of the left-wing bias of most of the thrillers. “In most thrillers it’s some conspiratorial right-wing…

There’s a lot going on in this mesmerizing Korean movie, yet all appears as still as the mountain lake on which it is set.

Not One Less, directed by Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern etc) is a propaganda film, a sad come-down for a very talented guy, I think—though its portrait of life among some of the poorest villages of China today is brilliantly rendered and memorably affecting. Here, too, is truth, and this is not…