Defending Your Life

There is a moment in What’s the Worst that Could Happen? where the movie almost seems to live up to the promise of its title. This comes when Max Fairbanks (Danny DeVito), a nasty and insufferable billionaire, attempts to justify to his wife, Lutetia (Nora Dunn) his behavior in getting involved in an increasingly destructive…

A charmer about the clash between teen-culture and reality whose cynicism and striving after hipness make it less good than it might have been

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. In fact, every review of a Steven Spielberg film ought to stipulate this in its first paragraph: Spielberg is America’s most talented film-maker. Here’s an example of how talented he is. It’s a small one, but characteristic. At one point in his new film, A.I. Artificial…

Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown could be said to be a loving, autumnal tribute to the two great passions of its director’s life outside of the cinema, namely, jazz and psychotherapy. True, the movie contains no scenes involving therapy, nor even any reference to it, but its subtext is the fundamental therapeutic assumption of vulgar…

The most destructive technology yet devised by the mind of man — not the airplane but the movie about the airplane

A unexpectedly well-made movie about disability with outstanding performances in the principal roles