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Bruce Beresford does so many things so well that he should by rights be one of the best directors of our time. But there is a certain coarseness to his sensibility, a weakness for the sentimental cliché, which often comes near to vitiating even his best work. His latest film, Paradise Road, though I don’t…

A guy-comedy which dares to take the frat-boy romance with extremes of inebriation into disturbing new territory

Carl Franklin’s — and Denzel Washington’s — best movie since Devil in a Blue Dress is a thriller that really thrills

When Shakespeare decided to put a trio of witches into Macbeth he knew that their very presence would suggest to his audience something fearful beyond imagining. They were a kind of algebraic symbol for the unknown quantity of evil which the play, in more realistic fashion, attempted to solve for. Nowadays, the presence of witches…

A beautiful and profound meditation on the claims of a very little, very fragile human life upon eternity

John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes makes the typical mistake of movies that attempt to satirize the celebrity-obsessed media culture of which, inevitably, they themselves are a part. In fact, so reliably do movies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers or Costa Gavras’s Mad City get it wrong that the suspicious-minded might be tempted to think that…