Stairway to Heaven (A Matter of Life and Death)

Un Air de Famille, directed by Cédric Klapisch (While the Cat’s Away) from an original play by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, is enormous fun, and I highly recommend it if you are lucky enough to find it opening in your neighborhood. Denis (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is having affair with Betty (Miss Jaoui) while working for…

The Rainmaker is redundant proof that Francis Ford Coppola has lost it permanently. If you thought that things couldn’t get any worse for him after the egregious Jack, wait till you see this two-hour infomercial on behalf of the Trial Lawyers Association. Coppola seems to have used up whatever stores of subtlety and moral ambiguity…

A movie about the movies and their influence, for both good and ill, on American foreign relations

It’s not easy, being human. The older you get the more you understand this. It doesn’t get any harder, necessarily, but at some point, usually in middle age, you realize how hard it has been all along. Agnès Jaoui’s delightful film, Le Goût des Autres or The Taste of Others is about such an epiphany…

A Friend of the Deceased (Un Ami du Défunt), a Franco-Ukrainian film directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich and written—in Russian—by Andrei Kourkov, has a very attractive premiss. Tolia (Alexandre Lazarev), a translator living in Kiev and living a hand-to-mouth, hustling sort of existence not untypical of life in the former Soviet Union, finds that his rather…