Third Man, The

What, I wonder, is the point of remaking a film you’ve already made if you’re just going to make the same mistakes over again? In fact, in Just Visiting Jean-Marie Gaubert makes the same mistakes he made in Les Visiteurs (1993) only more so—perhaps because he took on John Hughes to help him tart the…

The comic insight at the heart of Jay Roach’s Meet the Parents lies in establishing the nexus between humorlessness, paranoia and sentimentality in Robert De Niro’s portrayal of every bachelor’s nightmare of the father of his intended. The late Adolf Hitler, I believe, had the same three qualities, though this is not a comparison in…

A gripping account of the capture of FBI mole Robert Hanssen which is just the teensiest bit hazy on why he wanted capturing

[See “Our Childless Dystopia” in The New Atlantis of Winter, 2007, under “Articles”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

The three Australian Twentyman brothers are such lovable criminals that we’re even supposed to love their criminality. In short, they’re just like American movie criminals.

Here are the good things about The Legend of Bagger Vance, written by Jeremy Leven from the novel by Steven Pressfield and directed by Robert Redford. It tells a story set in Savannah, Georgia, in about 1930 and never once mentions Jim Crow or Southern white racism. So familiar by now is the iconography of…