Stairway to Heaven (A Matter of Life and Death)

Romanticism gives way to blatant sentimentalism in Nick Cassavetes’s tribute to lifelong love. . .

John Sayles preaches yet another of his tedious sermons in the hope, presumably, that his two-cents’ worth might just tip the scales of public opinion against President Bush

Maybe I’m growing tired and jaded from seeing large numbers of mediocre movies, but more and more I find that the best I can say of a romantic comedy is that it’s not so bad as I expected it to be. This is certainly true of Someone Like You, primary responsibility for which belongs to…

There is often a satirical edge to Mike Myers’s comic speciality, which is characters who are trying and mostly failing to be cool. At some level, he understands the foolishness and moral poverty of the “cool” ideal and loves to laugh at those whose self-presentation falls pathetically short of their own self-image. But there is…

Movies about novelists can be even more deadly boring and narcissistic than novels about novelists. Wonder Boys, directed by Curtis Hanson from an adaptation by Steve Kloves of Michael Chabon’s novel, is a case in point. Not only is the movie far too taken up with writers and writerliness, it is a movie made according…

In the Realm of the Senses is a Japanese film made twenty years ago by Nagisa Oshima. At the time it was considered shocking even by the relaxed standards of the day and it was seized by U.S. Customs Agents. What innocent times they seem! Nowadays we aren’t so much more depraved than people were…