Heaven Can Wait

An absurd historical fantasy that accomplishes the impossible by making even its fellow Shakespeare authorship cranks look good by comparison

Maybe Ali McGraw couldn’t have managed it, but one would have liked to see the beautiful and talented Leelee Sobieski given a chance to move an audience without having to die. Alas, it was not to be. Here On Earth, written by Michael Seitzman and directed by Mark Piznarski, is a remake of Love Story…

John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes makes the typical mistake of movies that attempt to satirize the celebrity-obsessed media culture of which, inevitably, they themselves are a part. In fact, so reliably do movies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers or Costa Gavras’s Mad City get it wrong that the suspicious-minded might be tempted to think that…

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

The safe and comfortable heroine of Anne Nelson’s play and Jim Simpson’s film manages to find a way to turn the focus of our attention from the tragedy of 9/11 to her reaction to it

Shakespeare in Love, which was directed by John Madden from a screenplay co-written by Tom Stoppard, has all the signs of the high Stoppardian style, including lots of puns and Elizabethan English transplanted to unexpected situations, where it takes on new and usually humorous meanings. And not only Elizabethan words either. At one point we…