Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life by Michael Paxton turns out to be a product of the Rand industry instead of a critical and dispassionate look at the life of the late novelist and philosopher. For anyone of critical temperament, watching it is only slightly less creepy than sitting through something called L. Ron Hubbard:…

I’m not quite sure how it does it, but the Australian film, The Dish, directed by Rob Sitch, gives the best cinematic account known to me of the American space program. On the surface, it is only tangentially about the Apollo 11 moonshot in July, 1969. Instead it concentrates on the true story of the…

Charles Darwin re-imagined by today’s progressive-minded atheists as the patron saint of their cause

Nettoyage à Sec (Dry Cleaning) by Anne Fontaine presents us with a French version of that now familiar Hollywood trope, merely gestured towards in 8mm, the capacity for sexual adventurism and even perversion in all of us. Nicole (Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie (Charles Berling) have been married for 15 years and run a dry-cleaning establishment in…

An updating of a classic film of the 1940s goes badly astray in a now-familiar way — by turning its heroes into victims

David Mamet’s remake of The Winslow Boy — which was first adapted for the screen from Terence Rattigan’s play by Anthony Asquith in 1948 — gets my universally-coveted double stars not so much because it is a wonderful movie as because it is a wonderful event — a poke in the eye to the Zeitgeist…