Christmas in July

Once again, Clint Eastwood reaches after profundity and compassion but can grasp only conventional emotions and beliefs

Dante’s Peak by Roger Donaldson (written by Leslie Bohem) is a standard-formula disaster movie. The hero, Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) is a ruggedly handsome vulcanologist who (we learn over the opening credits) has lost his fiancée, a colleague, to an erupting volcano. Now he harbors his secret sorrow and treads a lone path through the…

Un Air de Famille, directed by Cédric Klapisch (While the Cat’s Away) from an original play by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, is enormous fun, and I highly recommend it if you are lucky enough to find it opening in your neighborhood. Denis (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is having affair with Betty (Miss Jaoui) while working for…

There is more than a hint of political correctness about this film’s self-discoveries, which the audience will have figured out long before the characters do

An often funny but ultimately depressing take on where and how American family values, if any, still exist

And here comes yet another baby-boomer with a lingering grudge against daddy. Stop the presses!