My Man Godfrey

The paradox of cinéma vérité is that the excitement of being in ever closer touch with real life via the camera is always being undermined by the banality of what real life generally has to show us. For this reason, the most vérité generally has to be the most feigning. But the various sorts of…

A Brazilian revenge-drama is too portentous and fraught with religious significance for all but the most militant of atheists to appreciate

The problem with L’Homme du Train (The Man on the Train), directed by Patrice Leconte (La Veuve de Saint-Pierre, La Fille Sur La Pont, Ridicule) and written by Claude Klotz (Le Mari de la Coiffeuse) is its very French notion of redemption through crime. Like last year’s Sur Mes LPvres (Read My Lips) by Jacques…

Pixar shows its technical accomplishment once again, but as in Toy Story and A Bug’s Life it doesn’t quite make the feeling believable

Not of this World by Giuseppe Piccioni is, like Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, a life-changing movie, a movie that I would have thought it impossible to watch unmoved, impossible to forget once seen, but for the fact that the New York Times‘s critic called it a “loamy soap opera” and “a melodrama of…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. In fact, every review of a Steven Spielberg film ought to stipulate this in its first paragraph: Spielberg is America’s most talented film-maker. Here’s an example of how talented he is. It’s a small one, but characteristic. At one point in his new film, A.I. Artificial…