Heaven Can Wait

Deconstructing Harry by Woody Allen is like every other Woody Allen movie: a succession of more or less good jokes bound together by an essentially puerile fantasy. Or, in this case, a succession of interlocking fantasies. Harry Block (Mr Allen) is a novelist who is forever mining his chaotic private life for material for his…

Having once lived in the area served by Channel 6 (Harrisburg, York, Lancaster, Lebanon), where Russ Richards (John Travolta) works as celebrity weather man in Nora Ephron’s amusing Lucky Numbers, I can assure you that not everybody in Central Pennsylvania is a moron. Nor would anyone but a supercilious Hollywood type suppose that “Harrisburg’s most…

A film critic called upon to review a James Bond movie feels a bit like a restaurant critic who is asked to review McDonald’s. The World is Not Enough, directed by Michael Apted, is like most of its 18 predecessors pure McEntertainment. Anyone who has been to the other Bond films will know exactly what…

Like the Iliad, Biker Boyz — directed by Reggie Rock Bythewood from a screenplay he co-wrote with Craig Fernandez and based on an article by Michael Gougis in New Times magazine — presents us with the theatre of raw masculinity. Also like the Iliad it depicts a series of stylized taunts and scenes of individual…

An interesting and authentic-looking account of men in combat in Afghanistan but one with a depressingly familiar anti-war subtext

Next Stop, Wonderland, written and directed by Brad Anderson, is a charming romantic comedy with a great many funny moments, though it doesn’t quite pull everything together in its rather unsatisfactory ending. But it has an excellent beginning. Erin (Hope Davis) comes home one day to find her live-in boyfriend, Sean (Phil Hoffman), moving out…