Defending Your Life

In Ride With the Devil, the great Taiwanese director Ang Lee shows once again that he has a kind of genius for the old Hollywood trick of adapting second-rank fiction to the big screen. This is not meant to be a put-down. First rank fiction very rarely makes a first rank movie. What to my…

Fallen, written by Nicholas Kazan and directed by Gregory Hoblit from the novel by Dawn Steele is an idiotic fantasy about a Biblical demon called Azazel who inhabits the body of a murderer named Edgar Reese (Elias Koteas). When Reese is executed for his crimes, the spirit of Azazel transmigrates into the bodies of various…

If you could legitimately take, as some reviewers seem illegitimately to have done, the final words of the Pakistani convenience store clerk, Nazir Chowdray (Ajay Naidu), in SubUrbia as the real direction in which the film is heading, it would not have been at all a bad picture — though written by Eric Bogosian (from…

Another indication, along with Black Hawk Down (but not Hart’s War), that the era of war movies in which the soldiers are either victims or psychopathic killers may be over.

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

Having once lived in the area served by Channel 6 (Harrisburg, York, Lancaster, Lebanon), where Russ Richards (John Travolta) works as celebrity weather man in Nora Ephron’s amusing Lucky Numbers, I can assure you that not everybody in Central Pennsylvania is a moron. Nor would anyone but a supercilious Hollywood type suppose that “Harrisburg’s most…