Pursuit of Happyness, The

For just a moment, about half way through, Hollow Reed by Angela Pope looks as if it is going to face a difficult problem honestly. Talk about suspense! But just as, when it looks as if the hero of a movie like Con Air is done for, you know he can’t be, so here you…

A Chef in Love (or, to give it its French title, Le Mille et Un Recettes d’un Cuisinier Amoureux) by Nana Djordjadze is a Franco-Georgian film which takes the fast-track to success by foreign language films: include lots of food. Set in the Caucasus in 1920, it is the story of a French chef, Pascal…

A brilliant and heart-breaking Iranian film that is also a superbly plotted detective story

A lamentably bad Christmas movie with no more understanding of the traditions and beliefs it exploits than the ninnies it portrays

The Fifth Element by Luc Besson is what every crappy Hollywood postmodern extravaganza would be if it had the wit and the boldness of the author of La Femme Nikita and The Professional—together with a Hollywood blockbuster-sized budget of $100 million. With it, postmodernism has entered into its rococo phase. Some day, if anyone ever…

Thieves by André Téchiné, is one of those films where the artistic means completely overpower the narrative ends. Here we have multiple narrators, shifts backward and forward in time, several brooding, complex, mysterious characters and a tangle of unexplained plot details trailing off into philosophical conversations full of gnomic utterance. And all for what? To…