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

Little Voice written and directed by Mark Herman from a stage-play by Jim Cartwright is a wonderful movie with an absolutely knockout performance by the eponymous Little Voice or LV (Jane Horrocks) up until its climax. After that, it simply doesn’t know what to do with the situation it has created and peters out in…

Blast from the Past, directed by Hugh Wilson, is a charming, funny, well-crafted and even touching comedy that deserves the large audience I expect it will attract. This is the more remarkable as it is the fourth time (at least) that Brendan Fraser has made this same movie. First he was Encino Man, a prehistoric…

Judging from one or two other reviews I have seen, critics seem to think that Con Air, directed by Simon West and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, is meant to be a witty send up of the macho action flick of which it is ostensibly an example. Maybe this is because Mr West has a background…

The Mighty directed by Peter Chelsom and based on the novel by Rodman Philbrick, is at least an improvement annoying Simon Birch of last month, though it uses essentially the same device: doomed crippled kid who is nevertheless smart as a whip (I have known a lot of crippled kids, by the way, and never…

Britain may be the only country in the world where it is still possible to make movies which glorify and romanticize and sentimentalize an old-fashioned view of masculinity—and have it come off looking progressive. Last spring we had Brassed Off which traded off its romantic notions of a stag-line of Yorkshire coal-miners down t’pit or…

A couple of months ago I picked Stigmata the front-runner in the Worst-Movie-of-the Year Stakes, but Kevin Smith’s disastrously awful Dogma has now blown by it in the stretch and is cantering towards the finish several lengths ahead of the field. Since his promising debut with Clerks (1994), Smith has been going steadily downhill in…