Between Two Worlds

Character by Mike Van Diem, the Dutch winner of the Academy Award for best foreign film, is an astonishingly old fashioned picture, of a sort (here is a sobering thought) that simply could not be made in America today. Some representative of the feminist thought police would have got to it long before it was…

Love Stinks is a nasty little film but, it might seem, something of a curiosity among recent Hollywood products in being entirely oriented toward the masculine point of view—or at least what people accustomed to the courtship rituals of late-20th century America will regard as such. For in truth, however revolting the male habit of…

The title of the latest movie to come out of the Evil Empire is Disney’s “The Kid”, possibly because the filmmakers were afraid that people might confuse it with the Charlie Chaplin classic of 1921—though more likely because Disney’s appalling hubris just can’t bear not to have its loathsome name on everything it produces. The…

Tea With Mussolini is, like so many other works by its director and co- writer (with John Mortimer) Franco Zeffirelli, for movie-goers with rather more of a sweet-tooth than I generally find I have. Adapted from Zeffirelli’s autobiography, it tells the story of a small Italian boy called Luca (played as a child by Charlie…

In Les Misérables, directed by Bille August, it is the film itself which turns out to be misérable: thin and poor and wretched and in need of feeding up. The one thing you don’t want to skimp on when you are filming an epic is the epic proportions. August, a fine director of intense and…

Bruce Beresford does so many things so well that he should by rights be one of the best directors of our time. But there is a certain coarseness to his sensibility, a weakness for the sentimental cliché, which often comes near to vitiating even his best work. His latest film, Paradise Road, though I don’t…