Stairway to Heaven (A Matter of Life and Death)

Surprisingly, U-Turn by Oliver Stone is actually a rather enjoyable evening in the cinema, or it would be if it weren’t marred by the patented Stone phantasmagoric style. Dealing with a whimsical script like this one (by John Ridley, adapted from his book “Stray Dogs”) is something Stone should never allow himself to do, because…

In The Pledge Sean Penn (director) and Jack Nicholson (star) have teamed up to give us a portrait of the hero as “a drunk and a clown” — which has a certain appropriateness, I suppose. There’s even a part for Mickey Rourke here — to say nothing of cameo roles for such actors as Tom…

Those who remember fondly Francis Veber’s The Dinner Game from the summer before last may be a bit disappointed in Le Placard (The Closet)—which has a lot of the earlier film’s comic invention but also, to those of us who are accustomed to Hollywood-style propaganda, enough of an ideological edge to give it an unbalancing…

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…

Like The Damned United, this is another British film which derives its oomph from a (mostly) successful attempt to recapture the way things were decades ago — and persuading us that it matters

There are several things to like in Armageddon, directed by Michael Bay. One is that the sympathetic main character, Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), is a wildcat oil-driller who is introduced to us as he harasses a Greenpeace ship which has been sent to harass his offshore drilling platform by hitting golf balls at it. The…