Pursuit of Happyness, The

In real life, recovery from addiction is a great and inspiring thing; in the movies not so much

The problem with the super-hero is how unsuper everybody else has to be to make him one

For a few moments near the beginning of Betty Thomas’s 28 Days (written by Susannah Grant) you might almost begin to think that the comic drunk, that staple of 1950s humor who has now almost completely disappeared from the cultural landscape, was making a comeback. Nowadays, of course, we tend to think that laughing at…

Run Lola Run, written and directed by Tom Tykwer, is the kind of film for which critics must have invented the word “stylish.” It is so stylish in fact that it thinks it has nothing to do but to be stylish. And indeed many critics seem to have forgiven it all its many little incoherences…

In Love and War is a New Line release of a Richard Attenborough film, based on Henry Villard’s book, Hemingway in Love and War. It is co-written by Villard’s son, Dimitri. Villard Sr. was in Italy with Hemingway and Agnes von Kurowsky, the (American) nurse on whom Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms is…

The Horse Whisperer, directed by and starring Robert Redford, should come with a disclaimer: “Includes no actual whispering.” Or rather, there is one moment near the end when the alleged whisperer, Tom Booker (Mr Redford) does whisper to the horse: “There’s something you have to do, tomorrow, boy,” but it seems a long time to…