Worth Seeing
[See discussion under “My diary” entry for June 28, 2012]
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It is unfortunate for Stephen Frears’s The Van, based on the novel by Roddy Doyle, that it is coming out at a time when the economies not only of most of the countries where it will be seen but even that of perennially down-on- its-luck Ireland, where the film is set, are booming. The careful…
Pay it Forward by Mimi Leder is meant to be another in what I take to be a new series of heart-tugging, inspirational tales like Music of the Heart or American Beauty (which also starred Kevin Spacey) that derive their oomph from the assumption that life in America is pretty grim and miserable but that…
Outside Providence, adapted from his own novel by Peter Farelly, with his brother, Bobby, and directed by Michael Corrente, is better than most of the other late-summer kid movies, such as Detroit Rock City, The Adventures of Sebastian Cole or Teaching Mrs. Tingle. For one thing, it actually has some sort-of funny lines in it—for…
Celebrity is the first good film Woody Allen has made since Husbands and Wives, though it’s still not all that great. It is about celebrity, which is a subject of major concern to the postmodernist sensibility, and it makes use of a central postmodern joke. That is, the celebrity director known as “Woody Allen,” does…
A movie that tries harder than we might have expected to create a plausible dramatic framework for its story of Dark Age love and death but which can’t get over its psycho-therapeutic sappiness
Well, they got the loathing part right anyway. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, directed by Terry Gilliam, is very nearly as unwatchable as the book by Hunter S. Thompson on which it is based is unreadable. In spite of the presence of Johnny Depp, for whose talent I have considerable respect, in the Raul…
