Stairway to Heaven (A Matter of Life and Death)

A historically dubious romp with a fun-loving FDR which nevertheless manages to get one or two big things right

Hurlyburly directed by Anthony Drazan and written (from his stageplay) by David Rabe has an all-star cast, but it cannot escape from the poverty of its script, in which nothing very much happens (people come and go) and all the characters talk exactly alike—that is in a kind of souped-up psychobabble with an occasionally Pinterian…

Every cliché of the post-1960s prison movie is taken out and put through its paces, but don’t worry: it’s all in fun

A sometimes amusing take on a traditional Hollywood theme that ends in something close to despair

“Unclog any tubes today?” asks waspish wife Phyllis (Julie Christie) of her husband, Lucky Mann (Nick Nolte), a philandering plumber and handyman in Alan Rudolph’s Afterglow. “Pipes. The word is pipes,” he insists, though we have just been watching him wielding his tool in such a suggestive way (“Turn me on” he says to a…

Love and Death on Long Island, directed by Richard Kwietniowski from a novel by Gilbert Adair, is not really about death. Its title puns on the name of its principal character, played by John Hurt, who is called Giles De’Ath. But it might as well have been called De’Ath in Venice, since it is all…