Matter of Life and Death, A (Stairway to Heaven)

Brian De Palma is a talented director, but he really needs to get himself some better writers. Mission to Mars is full of clever ideas, which are too rare in the movies, and spectacular, computer-generated special effects, which are not nearly rare enough, but much of the dialogue is cornball stuff that could have come…

Where Twin Town is determinedly cutting edge, Brassed Off by Mark Herman is quaintly old-fashioned. It is so both in being a straightforward, Rocky type story of a Yorkshire village’s brass band making it to the finals of the national band competition and in being the crudest sort of left wing propaganda—the sort of propaganda…

How do you get away, in today’s Hollywood, with a movie celebrating masculine domination and feminine submission? Easy! Make it a matter of kinky sex.

Roman Polanski makes a political movie for the people — unfortunately, there are a lot of them, particularly in Europe — whose politics are just like his

Jim Jarmusch finds his alter ego in Bill Murray and his cinematic vision in the burn-out’s 1000 yard stare

Kenneth Branagh’s new film of Love’s Labour’s Lost has very little to do with the play of the same name by William Shakespeare. Branagh’s marketability (such as it is) has always been pretty closely tied to that of the 16th century playwright, but here he is shamelessly using the Shakespeare brand name simply in order…