Defending Your Life

The Thomas Crown Affair, a remake by John McTiernan of the classic of 1968 which starred Steve McQueen, is what I like to call a designer movie. True, it is also a cleverly conceived heist caper whose interesting premiss is that a rich man, the eponymous Mr. Crown (Pierce Brosnan), in search of excitement will…

Anyone who is still familiar with Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” will find little to recognize in its Tim Burtonification as Sleepy Hollow. Burton has filled this bit of belletrist whimsy from the now almost-unimaginable past with his familiar, not to say trademark devices. All takes place amidst spooky landscapes in grey and black,…

Nights of Cabiria by Federico Fellini, recently re-released in a restored version, stars the great director’s wife, Giulietta Massina as the Roman prostitute, Cabiria, whose fortunes and misfortunes in the mid-1950s, must now seem to us to come from a world as long gone as Dante’s or Manzoni’s. All is now changed, changed utterly, since…

An often funny but ultimately pretty trivial movie about the pain of adolescents with absent fathers

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

For Luc Besson, angels are apparently as sexy as assassins — though this means that they’re not very persuasive as angels