Defending Your Life

Playing God, directed by Andy Wilson and written by Mark Haskell Smith is yet another example of the work of the Taranteenies, those hip young filmmakers who have dominated creative thinking in Hollywood for the past three or four years, in the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s success with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. You’d think…

The safe and comfortable heroine of Anne Nelson’s play and Jim Simpson’s film manages to find a way to turn the focus of our attention from the tragedy of 9/11 to her reaction to it

Jason Bourne stands for the exquisite conscience of liberal America which, when geostrategic necessity comes calling, can only cry out that they should have left us alone

Beautiful People, written and directed by Jasmin Dizdar, is what we might call a Rodney King movie—a relatively harmless, feel-good concoction of a familiar kind which asks, rhetorically, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Of course, neither Jasmin Dizdar nor Rodney King is interested in any answer there may be to their question. Instead,…

A disgraceful bit of hyped-up PR on behalf of an unapologetic thief, bully and rapist

It would take too long to catalogue all the excellences of Agnieszka Holland’s adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square, but chief among them must be the performances of the actors in the four principal roles. Albert Finney plays rich Dr. Sloper, Ben Chaplin plays the handsome bounder, Morris Townsend, who comes to court his plain…