Pursuit of Happyness, The

Wild Man Blues by Barbara Kopple is a documentary about Woody Allen and a pickup band and their tour of Europe to play New Orleans jazz. The deal must have been for Barbara to come along and get lots of shots of Woody and Soon-Yi, suitable for tabloid TV, in exchange for making Woody look…

A portrait of spiritual and emotional emptiness among the academic classes — that may or may not be spiritually and emotionally empty itself

The Big One is Michael Moore’s return to the merry prankster movie—like his breakout hit Roger and Me—after a detour through a feeble attempt at comedy-drama in Canadian Bacon. He is once again playing a kind of political Allen Funt who brings his cameras into various corporate headquarters—or, in one instance, the Wisconsin state capital—and…

The impulse behind this multicultural French film is a good one, but the translation makes it sound as if these French high school kids were trying, and failing, to talk in Ebonics

A thrilling, true-life account of American heroism in Afghanistan in 2005 and an end-around Hollywood’s leftist politics

Not One Less, directed by Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern etc) is a propaganda film, a sad come-down for a very talented guy, I think—though its portrait of life among some of the poorest villages of China today is brilliantly rendered and memorably affecting. Here, too, is truth, and this is not…