Pursuit of Happyness, The

It cannot have escaped the notice of my readers that a favorite trope of liberals and other lefties — who more often call themselves “progressives” these days — is that all conservatism is just reflexive resistance to change, and that conservative political proposals are ipso facto designed with the more or less deliberate aim in…

In Anaconda, Danny (Ice Cube), while he is being pursued up the Amazon by a gigantic, man-eating snake and a homocidal river man, dreams of being back in “civilization” — by which he means “on the L.A. freeways with my cell phone.” Ha! If you’ve got to choose between the giant snake and the river…

A very slow-moving, atmospheric appreciation of the 19^th century outlaw — or at least of his celebrity, which it seems a shame his assassin did not inherit

La Desenchantée by Benoit Jacquot stars the stunning young actress, Judith Godrèche, as Beth, a supposedly down on her luck teenager who, far more rapidly than most teenagers (especially teenagers who look like this) is shorn of her illusions as a sheep in the springtime is shorn of its wool. I am suspicious of a…

Are even the French beginning to get a little tired of existential angst? See Yann Samuell’s movie and judge for yourself

Somewhere near the end of The Insider, written by Eric Roth and directed by Michael Mann, we overhear a TV announcer talking about “a fraud perpetrated on the American people”—by which he means the tobacco companies’ concealment from public view of what they know of the harm caused by their product. But the real fraud…