Pursuit of Happyness, The

East is East by Damien O’Donnell, from a script by Ayub Khan-Din, is worth seeing because of its wry look at the culture clash between East and West in a working class area of Leeds, West Yorkshire, in the early 1970s, and for the terrific performance of Om Puri in the role of the Pakistani…

A sometimes amusing but morally illiterate "neo-Western" which seems likely to spawn numerous imitators

Just imagine what you would get if the director of Trainspotting turned his hand to romantic comedy and, sure enough, that’s pretty much what you get with Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary. As with Trainspotting and their earlier hit, Shallow Grave, Boyle is joined by Andrew Macdonald (producer) and John Hodge (writer), but by…

Another hokey and tasteless attempt at audience manipulation from the Merchant-Ivory rubbish factory

Flawless, written and directed by Joel Schumacher, is an odd-couple picture featuring Robert DeNiro as a retired policeman and security guard called Walt who suffers a stroke and turns for rehabilitative help to his neighbor, a “female impersonator” (as he prefers to call it) and cross-dresser called Rusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Rusty is to teach…

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