Between Two Worlds

Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam represents yet another mile-marker in Mr Lee’s progress from interesting young filmmaker to boring commercial hack. He no longer seems to have anything to say except for the same kinds of things he says in interviews to get attention: Clarence Thomas ought to be beaten with a baseball bat, Charlton…

The Thief directed by Pavel Chukhrai is a deeply moving meditation on family and fatherhood told from the point of view of Sanya (Misha Philipchuk) the six year old son of the beautiful Katya (Yekaterina Rednikova). His father having died of wounds shortly after the end of the Second World War, Sanya was born in…

The iron rule in Hollywood is that if you’ve got a hit, you’ve got to have a sequel. But what happens when the hit depends, as last year’s Blair Witch Project did, on a necessarily temporary illusion of reality? Fool me once and I’ll give you a good review; fool me twice and I’m an…

East is East by Damien O’Donnell, from a script by Ayub Khan-Din, is worth seeing because of its wry look at the culture clash between East and West in a working class area of Leeds, West Yorkshire, in the early 1970s, and for the terrific performance of Om Puri in the role of the Pakistani…

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…

What happens when anything can happen? Pretty much nothing. Or at least nothing that anyone needs to care about