Invasion of the Body Snatchers

We might call Metro by Tom Carter a palimpsest movie—one where you can read another text beneath the one on the surface. To some extent this is true of all Hollywood movies, which are made (as they nearly always have been made) with a cavalier disregard for the writer’s craft. At some point in the…

A Civil Action, directed by Steven Zaillian, is not, as I expected it to be, another of those God-awful Grisham things about noble, crusading trial lawyers getting the better of evil, corrupt insurance companies. In real life, it is usually the trial lawyers who are the bad guys and the insurance companies their victims, but…

What happens when anything can happen? Pretty much nothing. Or at least nothing that anyone needs to care about

Four Days in September by the Brazilian director Bruno Barreto has about it the sepia tones of an old photograph. How strange people were in those far off days of 1969, and what strange things they did. Much credit is due to Barreto, himself a former leftist, for the skill and artistic restraint involved in…

A bit of magical realism that is too heavy on the magic and too light on the realism

Despite some stirring moments, and a fine performance from Gary Oldman, the movie gets its portrait of a war leader wrong