My Man Godfrey

Live Flesh by Pedro Almodovar begins with a scene, set on a lonely night in 1970, in which a baby is born on a bus on the way to the hospital. There is a comic bus driver and a comic older woman helping the baby be born. “If idiots like us didn’t give birth,” she…

Déjà Vu, directed by Henry Jaglom, stars the director’s wife, Victoria Foyt, as Dana, an American in Israel on a buying trip who meets a woman in a café who tells her a sad story of her life. “We were soulmates,” she tells her. “He was the love of my life.” But “life got hold…

Dangerous Beauty by Marshall Herskovitz bills itself as a “true story” of Venice in the 1580s, but if there is one thing this film is not, it is not true to Venice in the 1580s. The story of a courtesan and a poetess called Veronica Franco (Catherine McCormack) is made into an object lesson in…

A Friend of the Deceased (Un Ami du Défunt), a Franco-Ukrainian film directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich and written—in Russian—by Andrei Kourkov, has a very attractive premiss. Tolia (Alexandre Lazarev), a translator living in Kiev and living a hand-to-mouth, hustling sort of existence not untypical of life in the former Soviet Union, finds that his rather…

Two Girls and A Guy, directed by James Toback, stars Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner as Carla and Lou, two young women who meet at the entrance to an apartment building where both are waiting for someone. They do not know each other. Lou, a bubbly sort, strikes up a conversation and enthuses about…

A bit of determined uplift that would be more effective if it didn’t try so hard