Fargo

A one-joke wonder — and the wonder is that anyone finds even the one joke funny

There is scarcely a cliché of the 1990s Hollywood thriller that is not to be found in Switchback, written and directed by Jeb Stuart. By now, the figure of the serial killer — so rare in nature, so common in the movies — has become such a familiar one that a filmmaker like Stuart will…

The only thing Sharon Pollack’s Everything Relative has going for it is its political correctness. Billed as “a lesbian Big Chill” the film is amateurish, self-indulgent, stupid, sentimental, politically tendentious, ill written, ill-acted and ill-directed, but, by golly, it hews to the Party line without the slightest deviation. Pro-choice, pro-left, anti-Christian, anti-conservative: all its views…

You’ve got to hand it to Nicole Kassell and Kevin Bacon, for in making a hero of a child molester they haven’t taken the easy way to pleasing audiences

It’s sad to see a talented filmmaker like Steven Soderbergh descend to the quasi-propaganda and pure schlock of Erin Brockovich. Julia Roberts plays the eponymous Erin, a nasty, unpleasant foul-mouthed harridan meant to be both attractive and admirable to us because, I guess, she is Julia Roberts and doing feisty. Be feisty, Julia. And Julia…

It’s not easy, being human. The older you get the more you understand this. It doesn’t get any harder, necessarily, but at some point, usually in middle age, you realize how hard it has been all along. Agnès Jaoui’s delightful film, Le Goût des Autres or The Taste of Others is about such an epiphany…