Defending Your Life

Steven Spielberg’s watchable but naïve and incoherent account of the revenge by Israel for the murder of its Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972

All Hollywood agrees that anytime someone makes a movie about TV or the media culture it is ipso facto a serious picture. And a picture — like, for instance, Natural Born Killers — which hasn’t a serious bone in its body can be instantly transformed into a serious picture by the addition of a “satirical”…

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…

The Man Who Knew Too Little, directed by Jon Amiel, is for fans of the comedic style of Bill Murray who—as he does in such mediocre movies as Kingpin and What About Bob?—manages to wring what genuine comedy there is out comic situations so outlandish that they would bring a blush of shame to the…

It’s nice to know, as I’m sure I’ve said before, that somewhere in the world life on celluloid is still an earnest business and not a sly, postmodern in-joke as it has so largely become in the pampered West. You might have to go to China, however, still not recovered from nearly 50 years of…

All the way through The Winter Guest, which was directed and co-written by the fine British actor Alan Rickman, I was bothered by the fact that the action (I use the term loosely) was supposed to be taking place on “the coldest day in living memory” in East Fife, Scotland. Anyone who has ever been…