Between Two Worlds

This Michael Douglas-Albert Brooks odd-couple pairing has a few good jokes but nothing to say that has not been said, and very often said, before.

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

Le Mépris, or Contempt, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, was directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1963, but has just been re-released in a newly refurbished print. Michel Piccoli stars as Paul, a Communist playwright being wooed by a dumb American millionaire called Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance) to re-write a script for a film…

The Designated Mourner, written by Wallace Shawn and directed by David Hare, is chiefly remarkable for the fact that it shows Mike Nichols can act. Or at least overact. It’s hard to tell if it is Mr Shawn’s overheated writing, Mr Hare’s spare, intense directing or Mr Nichols’s own natural hamminess, but the overall effect…

Once again the Coen brothers show themselves to be master craftsmen of the cinema without anything much to say

The Protestant Reformation? Eric Till appears not to have heard of it. But of course that doesn’t stop his Martin Luther from being a hero of our time