Breach

Dirty Work, directed by Bob Saget, is utterly without redeeming features: boring, stupid and unfunny. Even my two sub-teen boys thought it was bad, and worse than that movies like this do not get. Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Portrait of a Lady by Jane Campion has a very strange beginning. A bunch of contemporary girls, photographed in black and white and grainy stills, as if they were the fading memories, talk about love and men and kissing and “relationships” and marriage over opening credits until one holds out her hand and we see…

The absurdly pretentious and over-ambitious winner of this year’s Cannes Festival is at least pretty to look at

Dominique Deruddere’s Everybody’s Famous! (Iedereen Beroemd! in his native Flemish) is a rather charming little movie, though without enough of a sense of detachment from the dream of pop music fame which it otherwise makes fun of. Some will say it is condescending, but I don’t think it condescending enough, at least in this sense….

“She was too good for this life. . .” wrote Philip Larkin of the graffiti-covered bathing beauty on the advertising poster for “Sunny Prestatyn” and his ironic pity came to mind as I watched Gillian Anderson piling up the pathos as Lily Bart in Terence Davies’s screen adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of…

A touching documentary portrait of a not-quite tragic fall from what passes these days for greatness