Third Man, The

Dr Doolittle, directed by Betty Thomas, stars Eddie Murphy as the eponymous doctor who can talk to the animals. For the nineties, all the whimsy of Hugh Lofting’s literary creation and the earlier film version starring Rex Harrison has given way to post-modern joking as celebrity voices are put into animal mouths and made to…

Despite having almost nothing to do with the novel by Alexandre Dumas from which it is supposedly adapted, The Man in the Iron Mask by Randall Wallace is not so bad as one might have expected it to be. Certainly it is a lot better than the ineffably silly Three Musketeers of a few years…

Oliver Stone’s capacity for distorting and trivializing history, always considerable, reaches new heights

A beautiful and profound meditation on the claims of a very little, very fragile human life upon eternity

A Merry War is the American title given to the adaptation by Robert Bierman (director) and Alan Plater (writer) of George Orwell’s sunniest novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying— presumably because Americans don’t know what an aspidistra is. For the record, it is a houseplant with long, leathery swordlike leaves which, in the 1930s was a…

A movie to promote the self-conceit of ageing hippies left behind by "history"