Breach

Occasionally I go to see a film by a young independent director in the hopes of seeing some signs of life beyond the stuffed and mounted product of Hollywood—and hence in the hope of an escape from the moral smugness of the Hollywood ethos. But, judging by Crossing Fields, written and directed by a young…

Let’s Talk About Sex is written and directed by Troy Beyer, who also stars as Jazz, an agony aunt columnist in Miami who wants to be the host of a TV talk show called “Girl Talk.” Her getting the gig depends on her putting together a demo tape in only a few days, which starts…

To the question of why anyone would want to rewrite King Lear so as to make Goneril and Regan the heroines and poor old Lear and (to a lesser extent) Cordelia the villains, there can only be one answer: in order to make a revolutionary statement. Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, now translated to the…

At the beginning of Anna and the King, directed by Andy Tennant and adapted by Steve Meerson from The English Governess at the Siamese Court by Anna Leonowens (1870), Mrs Leonowens (Jodie Foster), a widow, explains to her young son Louis (Tom Felton) why she has come to Siam as tutor to the son of…

Class struggle in the French cinema of today

The best line in Random Hearts, adapted from the novel by Warren Adler by Kurt Luedtke and directed by Sydney Pollack, comes when the frail-looking but impossibly beautiful novice congresswoman, Kay Chandler (Kristin Scott-Thomas) tries to get tough with the tough old cop, “Dutch” Van Den Broeck (Harrison Ford), from the District of Columbia Police…