Between Two Worlds

Antz directed by Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson begins with unmistakable Woody Allen—i.e. not some animated ant named “Z”—in analysis, feeling neurotic because, as the middle child of 5 million he didn’t get a lot of attention as a child. He tells the doctor that he is intimidated by the ant work-ethic: “Everything for the…

Earlier this year, in a review of Panic by Henry Bromell, I observed that it was possible to appreciate a film which is an impressive bit of propaganda for a political position with which you profoundly disagree. Just think of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will. Nowadays, the most assiduous ideologues among film-makers are…

The re-release of Jules Dassin’s Rififi (French title: Du Rififi Chez les Hommes) of 1954 comes opportunely to remind the Hollywood epigoni known to these pages as the Taranteenies of what film noir really was. The chief difference between it and that which too often, and too erroneously, goes under the same name today, is…

Is it possible for a man to have friends without regressing to boyhood? Not according to this unfunny comedy

An amusing fairy tale that sometimes flirts with over-seriousness

Dancing at Lughnasa, written by Frank McGuinness from play by Brian Friel and directed by Pat O’Connor, stars Marvelous Meryl Streep doing a vowel-perfect Irish accent as Kate Mundy, a severe old maid and schoolmistress who is trying to hold together her little family in Ireland in the 1930s. The family consists of her four…