Heaven Can Wait

The Postman by Kevin Costner was made about 25 years too late. This is the kind of thing that would have seemed “deep,” or possibly “heavy” to the drugged-out hippies of the Vietnam era, but is just laughable now. Even the audience of film critics I saw it with laughed out loud at several of…

Wide Awake, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, must have attracted its stars — Denis Leary, Dana Delaney and Rosie O’Donnell, all of whom are badly miscast — because it tells what purports to be a heartwarming story of a kid in Catholic school, presumably of Irish extraction, who has to come to terms with his…

In Love and War is a New Line release of a Richard Attenborough film, based on Henry Villard’s book, Hemingway in Love and War. It is co-written by Villard’s son, Dimitri. Villard Sr. was in Italy with Hemingway and Agnes von Kurowsky, the (American) nurse on whom Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms is…

Bulworth is Hollywood political fantasy from one of Hollywood’s inveterate political fantasists, Warren Beatty, who is both director and star. Like The American President, which starred Beatty’s wife, Annette Bening, this movie proposes that the ticket to electoral success in America is a frank and robust avowal of socialist principles by hitherto cowardly and mealy-mouthed…

Dominique Deruddere’s Everybody’s Famous! (Iedereen Beroemd! in his native Flemish) is a rather charming little movie, though without enough of a sense of detachment from the dream of pop music fame which it otherwise makes fun of. Some will say it is condescending, but I don’t think it condescending enough, at least in this sense….

A celebration of the rich, multicultural tapestry that is Britain today whose sunny, funny approach to questions of cultural difference is perhaps just a tad overoptimistic.