Christmas in July

Jerry Springer in ‘Ringmaster,’ directed by Neil Abramson and written by Jon Bernstein, stars Jerry Springer as the host of a daytime talk show very much like “The Jerry Springer Show”—only a disclaimer at the end informs us that this Jerry and that Jerry have nothing to do with one another. It is the downmarket…

Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl, directed by Joan Chen stars the beautiful young actress Lu Lu as the title character, a girl living with her happy family in Chengdu during the Chinese Cultural Revolution who is ordered, along with eight million other teenagers from the cities during the years 1966-76, to “go down” into…

[See discussion under “My diary” entry for July 26, 2012] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Volker Schlöndorff’s film, The Legend of Rita has many virtues, not the least of them being a wonderfully watchable leading lady in Bibiana Beglau. She is a sort of Communist version of Betjeman’s wonderful tennis girls of suburban England: beautiful, strong-limbed, confident and somehow both terrifying and lovable at the same time. She plays the…

Agnès Jaoui’s terrrific new movie, Look at Me, begins in a taxicab as the passenger (Marilou Berry), attempts to get the surly driver (Jean-Pierre Lazzerini) to turn down the radio so that she can hear what someone is saying to her on her mobile phone. When her father (Jean-Pierre Bacri) gets into the cab, he…

A romantic murder mystery out of Argentina that has a lot to recommend it