Defending Your Life

A visually and dramatically impressive movie spoiled, in the end by a merely coy unwillingness to lift the artificial curtain between reality and unreality

An amusing but anodyne satire of the “spin” industry that lacks some of the bite it might have had if it had been less in sympathy with the health nuts it also satirizes

As usual, I’m afraid, science-fiction struggles vainly to escape from from its comic-book origins. Of course, most people won’t care about that. — From American Greatness of May 14, 2026

Time and again Hollywood, wearing its artist’s beret, attempts to satirize the entertainment business, of which Hollywood itself is so huge a part. Time and time and again it fails. I wonder why that is? By coincidence, we have the two latest attempts opening in consecutive weeks. But where 15 Minutes is a typical failure…

As I watched Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, I kept asking myself why this movie was being made. The decrepitude of its subject matter is obvious from its very first scenes when we see the eponymous Mr Ripley (Matt Damon) accompanying a lieder singer at a private recital for…