Heaven Can Wait

The former satirist Morgan Spurlock makes the mistake of taking on a subject to which he is more sympathetic than he is to McDonald’s, the Bush administration or product placement

Liar Liar is another high-concept movie, this one directed by Tom Shadyac, who also directed Jim Carrey’s breakthrough film, Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. Here Carrey appears as Fletcher Reede, a shyster lawyer whose five year old son, Max (Justin Cooper) makes a birthday wish that, just for one day, his father cannot tell a lie….

Wild, Wild West, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, is one of those movies where you can reconstruct the story conference. “It’s James Bond in the Old West,” says the pitchman. “Only he’s black, you see. Will Smith would be perfect for the part. He can be a dandy, Maverick-like, and of course a ladies’ man. But…

The movie itself is at best routine, but it is interesting to watch the rather un-p.c. reactions of the audience

At a certain age, almost everyone is inclined to see his mother as a suffering saint and his father as a bully and a tyrant. It is a part of the process of growing up and corresponds with a youth’s period of greatest need to declare independence him- or herself from the paternal tie. It…

There is a certain kind of modern novel that is not really a novel at all but a series of ruminations on life, the universe and everything by a narrator who is a would-be philosopher and thinly disguised stand-in for the author. The master of this sort of ruminative fiction is Richard Ford, whose novels,…