Act of Valor

Live Flesh by Pedro Almodovar begins with a scene, set on a lonely night in 1970, in which a baby is born on a bus on the way to the hospital. There is a comic bus driver and a comic older woman helping the baby be born. “If idiots like us didn’t give birth,” she…

Conservatives should always beware of the media’s praise, but that goes double for Hollywood conservatives. Clint Eastwood wishes to announce that he’s grown.

A well made Spanish film about a couple of prostitutes that flirts a little too blatantly with sentimentalism

The 12 year-old eponymous hero of Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot, played by Jamie Bell, is made to say more than once that “just ‘cause I like ballet it doesn’t mean I’m a poof.” Sounds reasonable to me. But the film itself has a different story to tell. Both the introduction of Billy’s cross-dressing schoolboy friend,…

True, it’s not as bad as American Beauty, Sam Mendes’s earlier film, but it’s still quite bad enough.

You sure can tell that Among Giants was written by Simon Beaufoy (it was directed by Sam Miller), last heard from as the screenwriter of The Full Monty. Like Monty, this movie is set in (or near) Sheffield in Yorkshire and is an exercise in nostalgia and sentimentality of a peculiarly English—especially a northern English—type….