Act of Valor

Hotel de Love by Craig Rosenberg is, like Cosi, a fresh and amusing Australian film that puts Hollywood schlock like Fools Rush In to shame. It tells the story of twin brothers, Rick (Aden Young, who also plays Nick in Cosi) and Stephen (Simon Bossell) who fall in love with the same girl, Melissa (Saffron…

Breakdown by Jonathan Mostow is a superior sort of thriller that is a step in the right direction after recent Hollywood examples of the genre—that is, in the direction of the things that ordinary, reasonable people really do fear. Which is to say not unbelievably big Amazonian snakes or volcanos erupting in downtown Los Angeles…

Yet another attempt to bring the classic novel to the silver screen, but without paying much attention to anything in it beyond the plot.

The saga of media triumphalism continues and itself reaches a triumphalist stage

In Les Misérables, directed by Bille August, it is the film itself which turns out to be misérable: thin and poor and wretched and in need of feeding up. The one thing you don’t want to skimp on when you are filming an epic is the epic proportions. August, a fine director of intense and…

Rushmore, directed by Wes Anderson is a wonderfully strange movie whose strangeness is what makes it worth seeing. Its main character is Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a precocious 15-year old student at a posh prep-school called Rushmore Academy. He is there on scholarship as his father, wonderfully played by Seymour Cassel is a barber who…