Christmas in July

Sensitive writers rendered dysfunctional by their dysfunctional families — hm, where have we heard something like that before?

The version of Wolfgang Petersen’s classic Das Boot now arriving in your neighborhood multiplexes is a new director’s cut of the version of 1982 which adds over an hour of original footage to bring the film to an epic three and a half hours in length. The time flies. This is perhaps the best war…

Deep Impact, directed by Mimi Leder from a script by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, is one of what I take to be a new breed of Hollywood disaster flicks. Modeled on Independence Day, these are apocalyptic in scale, overburdened with special effects and pitched to a younger teen audience, but they are still…

[See “Entry from July 30, 2009” under “My Diary”]

A harrowing portrayal of an atrocity that no one should see — or want to see

A movie that just goes to show you that the virtues of understatement can be overstated