Third Man, The

Paul Thomas Anderson shows why style, however brilliant, cannot make up for basic flaws in content.

Where Twin Town is determinedly cutting edge, Brassed Off by Mark Herman is quaintly old-fashioned. It is so both in being a straightforward, Rocky type story of a Yorkshire village’s brass band making it to the finals of the national band competition and in being the crudest sort of left wing propaganda—the sort of propaganda…

A visually and dramatically impressive movie spoiled, in the end by a merely coy unwillingness to lift the artificial curtain between reality and unreality

Another ersatz film noir “based on fact” which uses its period setting as an excuse for graphic scenes of violence

A moving but ultimately unsatisfying study of a child’s sense of loss and abandonment

Tim Burton’s addiction to the fantastical is not improved by its encounter with the Southern Gothic. This one is only for incorrigible Burtonophiles.