Treasure of the Sierra Madre

What’s on tonight, honey? The end of the world? Not again!

The 13th Warrior, directed by John McTiernan, is a Hollywoodification of Michael Crichton’s attempt to re- imagine Beowulf in his novel, Eaters of the Dead, with the help of a 10th century Arabic account of adventures in Central Asia. It was Kipling who pioneered this sort of thing in his brilliant story, “The Knife and…

You’ve got to wonder about the chutzpah — or the stupidity — of a director who would invite comparisons between his movie and what is arguably the greatest work of dramatic art ever penned, Shakespeare’s King Lear. But the Danish director, Kristian Levring, has done it, and on the whole we can be glad that…

Abbott and Costello bump people off

Arab-Americans are protesting against the portrayal of Arabs in The Siege, the new movie by Edward Zwick, and so of course the politically correct will argue among themselves for a while about whether or not Arabs are being stereotyped as terrorists. The film’s apologists claim that, by including a token Arab (played by Tony Shalhoub)…

One of the classics from the great days of the earnest “intellectual spectaculars” of the 1960s comes to the Film Forum