Invasion of the Body Snatchers

That Old Feeling, directed by Carl Reiner, is a vehicle for Bette Midler to do her First Wives’ Club schtick all over again, but this time in the Goldie Hawn role as the over-the-hill starlet, Lilly. Dennis Farina plays her ex-husband, Dan, with whom she is said to have a hostile relationship with nuclear capability….

When the winner of the Big Game lottery jackpot of $197 million didn’t immediately come forward to claim his prize recently, newspapers were reduced to running an AP photo of the shop in Boston where the winning ticket was sold. In the photo a young man is shown from behind as he affixes a sign…

Volker Schlöndorff’s film, The Legend of Rita has many virtues, not the least of them being a wonderfully watchable leading lady in Bibiana Beglau. She is a sort of Communist version of Betjeman’s wonderful tennis girls of suburban England: beautiful, strong-limbed, confident and somehow both terrifying and lovable at the same time. She plays the…

A Bug’s Life, directed by John Lasseter “with co-direction by Andrew Stanton” and the usual array of celebrity voices including Kevin Spacey as the bad guy and Phyllis Diller as the ant-queen, is that by-now familiar Hollywood phenomenon, a movie about movies. The fact prompts the reflection that the American entertainment industry is so big…

There is sometimes a fine line between the pitiless, unflinching gaze that sees things as they are and the impulse to glory in moral squalor. Todd Solondz doesn’t avoid crossing it.

The Contender, written and directed by Rod Lurie, is yet another example of Hollywood’s idea of politics and even more bizarrely disconnected from reality than the director’s last outing, the appalling Deterrence which I reviewed in this space a few months ago. The film’s multiple absurdities and implausibilities would take too long to spell out…