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If John Woo thinks, as the publicity material claims, that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai is “the closest thing to a perfect movie that I have ever seen” I wonder why he does not make movies like it himself? In fact, Le Samourai, made in 1967 but only seen in this country before in the wake…

Polish Wedding, written and directed by Theresa Connolly is a relentlessly life-affirming story about a Polish family in Hamtramck, Michigan, which undergoes in its own lovably ethnic way several family crises of a sort that sometimes happen to non-Poles too. The incongruously Irish-looking Gabriel Byrne plays Bolek, the paterfamilias, who is being cuckolded by Jadzia…

We might call Metro by Tom Carter a palimpsest movie—one where you can read another text beneath the one on the surface. To some extent this is true of all Hollywood movies, which are made (as they nearly always have been made) with a cavalier disregard for the writer’s craft. At some point in the…

Double Jeopardy, directed by Bruce Beresford, is the latest example of what is coming to be one of Hollywood’s favorite new genres: the female paranoia movie. Like The Astronaut’s Wife of a few weeks ago, it deliberately sets out to exploit the sort of insecurity that has become endemic, in some ways the most destructive…

Michael Almereyda’s extremely hip film version of Hamlet could have given us a cogent reading of the play, if not necessarily exactly what it deserves. Some important critics, starting from the undoubted fact that Hamlet is a difficult and sometimes nasty character, a royal pain in the Elsinore, have gone on to conclude that the…

Based on real people and real events which took place in 1994, The Straight Story, directed by David Lynch and written by John Roach and Mary Sweeney, is bad in the way that the old Disney movies were bad instead of being bad in the way that the new Disney movies are bad — which…