My Man Godfrey

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…

The title is a lie. The only temptation fought with in this movie is the temptation to be pious and virtuous.

John Frankenheimer’s new movie, Reindeer Games, for which Ehren Kruger (Arlington Road) wrote the screenplay, is in some ways an admirably old-fashioned sort of picture. Or so I am inclined to think of any movie whose soul is its plot, as it generally is in the movies of the greatest directors from Hitchcock to Rohmer….

Grey Gardens by David and Albert Maysles is a re-release of the film they made in the 1970s about two women made interesting to the camera by the accident of celebrity, yet whose interest for us is owing simply to their strange and rather pathetic humanity. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter of the same…

Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon is worth seeing for two reasons. One is the remarkable performance of Jim Carrey as the late comic and performance artist (as we should call him today), Andy Kaufman. I confess that I have always numbered myself among the Carrey-skeptics, and cannot remember a single performance of his that…

Kevin Kline’s Mr Hundert is a (slightly) updated version of Mr Chips, and yet he seems to have missed his calling. He was meant to be Regis Philbin.