Pursuit of Happyness, The

The Gingerbread Man, directed by Robert Altman from a story by John Grisham is a kind of cross between Deliverance and Fatal Attraction—that is a meditation on how bad things happen to nice yuppies when they fall victim to wily backwoodsmen or “white trash tramps” or various sorts of throwbacks still lurking around the edges…

Volker Schlöndorff’s film, The Legend of Rita has many virtues, not the least of them being a wonderfully watchable leading lady in Bibiana Beglau. She is a sort of Communist version of Betjeman’s wonderful tennis girls of suburban England: beautiful, strong-limbed, confident and somehow both terrifying and lovable at the same time. She plays the…

A harrowing but dramatically not very interesting account of the Japanese sack of Nanjing in 1937 which is said to have killed 300,000 Chinese

A new Hollywood metaphysical so lacking in imagination that omnipotence is only a means to the end of  stardom as a local TV news anchor

Despite its apocalyptic theme, Last Night by the young Canadian director, Don McKellar, is a shockingly modest—and thus, to my way of thinking anyway, likeable—little film. Set on the human race’s last day, before an unspecified cataclysm puts an end to all life on earth, the film attempts to make no profound political or spiritual…

[See discussion under “My Diary” of June 25, 2014] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe