Act of Valor

. . .and the bad guys live happily ever after with their ill-gotten gains. Ho-hum. What a cliché this is becoming.

Another cinematic exercise in drinking deep from the intoxicating stream of popular paranoia

As in last year’s Run, Lola, Run, which was actually made later, the German director Tom Tykwer shows in Winter Sleepers his fascination with time and chance, with the momentous consequences of quite trivial causes — and his sense of style. But this film is less laden with cinematic trickery and self-conscious cleverness than Lola…

It is only to be expected that Mel Gibson takes on and defeats the entire British army, virtually single-handedly, in The Patriot, but you would have thought that at least the film would have had something to say about what, from the point of view of the historian, the Revolutionary War was actually fought about….

Errol Morris goes slumming

An interesting updating of Henry James’s novel chiefly worth seeing for the performance of its title character