Pursuit of Happyness, The

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…

What a lot of trouble and expense David Mamet goes to just to tell a few
jokes.

You sure can tell that Among Giants was written by Simon Beaufoy (it was directed by Sam Miller), last heard from as the screenwriter of The Full Monty. Like Monty, this movie is set in (or near) Sheffield in Yorkshire and is an exercise in nostalgia and sentimentality of a peculiarly English—especially a northern English—type….

A sometimes amusing take on a traditional Hollywood theme that ends in something close to despair

The Family Man, written by David Diamond and David Weissman and directed by Brett Ratner, is an attempt at a reverse It’s a Wonderful Life for the Christmases of the new millennium. Jack Campbell (Nicholas Cage) is a high-flying Wall Street whiz kid and swinging bachelor whose angel (played by Don Cheadle) lets him see…

Orphans, written and directed by Peter Mullan — the actor who played the title role in Ken Loach’s My Name is Joe — is a bit of a bore, at least insofar as its purpose is to teach a moral lesson that our times are not exactly desperately in need of. Avoid a rigid and…