Stairway to Heaven (A Matter of Life and Death)

Here is the story of Message in a Bottle, directed by Luis Madoki. A desperately sad widower and boat-builder, the strikingly handsome Garret Blake (Kevin Costner), puts letters to his dead wife in bottles and throws the bottles into the sea. They are found by a beautiful young, unattached single mother called Theresa (Robin Wright…

Happy Together, directed by the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai (Days of Being Wild, Chung-king Express), tells the story of two Chinese youths (Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai) living in Argentina. Fai (Mr Leung) and Ho Po Wing (Mr Cheung) are on-again, off-again lovers, the former sober and hard working, the latter a wild…

Yet more corruption in the LAPD makes you wonder if there are criminals in Los Angeles who aren’t wearing a badge

Play It To the Bone, directed by Ron Shelton, is a Woody Harrelson movie in every sense of the term — that is it is full of macho posturing at the same time that it attempts to make a joke (a rather tired joke by now, you might think) about male stupidity. This is how…

Small Soldiers, directed by Joe Dante, is typical of Hollywood attitudes towards military values and military people. Even the grief of soldiers for their dead comrades in arms is made fun of as the leader of the toy soldiers brought to life by computer wizardry pronounces over one of his men that: “Nick Nitro’s battery…

Margarethe von Trotta’s moving story of a few brave German women who successfully defied the Nazis after their husbands were arrested gets a bit lost in the complications of the telling