Between Two Worlds

Let me get this straight. We’re supposed to sympathize with this guy for wanting to blow himself up along with a bunch of people he doesn’t even know?

The Dinner Game, as the untranslatable Dîner de Cons is awkwardly but decorously rendered, is an uproarious French farce by Francis Veber, co-author of La Cage Aux Folles and creator on his own of a number of other plays and films in a similar style. It tells the story of Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte), a…

Cleverness and humor in the manipulation of absurdity can only take you so far. Just about this far, in fact.

Love Serenade, an Australian film by Shirley Barrett stars George Shevtsov as Ken Sherry, a recently divorced (for the third time) disc jockey from Brisbane who comes to work in the little Australian town of Sunray on the Murray River. Next door to him live two young sisters, Vicki Ann (Rebecca Frith) and Dimity (Miranda…

Arab-Americans are protesting against the portrayal of Arabs in The Siege, the new movie by Edward Zwick, and so of course the politically correct will argue among themselves for a while about whether or not Arabs are being stereotyped as terrorists. The film’s apologists claim that, by including a token Arab (played by Tony Shalhoub)…

In The Hurricane, Norman Jewison is going through the motions. His film takes an ostensibly true story which also conforms to a classic movie situation—a man condemned for a crime he did not commit—and allows our expectations to do all the work. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington) was a top middleweight contender in the mid-1960s…