Stairway to Heaven (A Matter of Life and Death)

3000 Miles To Graceland, a heist movie whose connection to Elvis is extremely tenuous, does persuade us of one thing: that Kevin Costner is much better as a villain than he is as the sensitive, silent, wounded hero he has been playing for most of his career. The trouble is that the villain is as…

The gay fantasy of sex divorced from sin is superimposed on a community of Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles

Pi, directed by Darren Aronofsky, is another chapter in the popular culture’s love affair with flashy intelligence—or at least the image of it. A gritty, black-and-white, low-budget version of Good Will Hunting, it does no better a job, however, at making such intelligence look real. For in addition to the usual mathematical parlor-tricks, this particular…

The best comment on Howard Stern’s Private Parts came in the New Yorker cartoon that showed one rueful movie-goer saying to the other: “I think I hate liking Howard Stern even more than I liked hating him.” Here he presents himself, with the help of Betty (Brady Bunch) Thomas, as just a good old-fashioned, all-American…

When The Very Thought of You, directed by Nick Hamm from a screenplay by Peter Morgan, was released in Britain last year, it was called Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence. The American distributors must have thought that sounded somehow too suggestive, so they gave it one of those nondescript American titles, like Lost and…

Flubber, directed by Les Mayfield, is a Disney remake of an original Disney movie of 1961 about a wonderful kind of “flying rubber” and called The Absent Minded Professor, directed by Robert Stevenson. It wasn’t a very good movie the first time around and it is, naturally enough, a much worse movie in the remake….