Breach
[See discussion under “My diary” entry for July 26, 2012]
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[See discussion under “My diary” entry for July 26, 2012]
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Idle Hands, directed by Rodman Flender (can there really be someone with such a name?), is another in the recent spate of teen movies. With what can only be considered predictable unsuccess, it tries to marry the old-fashioned, rather campy moralism of the old-time teen slasher movie with the hip, happenin’, po-mo wit of Scream….
Arguing the World, a documentary directed by Joseph Dorman, is what a documentary should be. That is, it persuasively re-creates a historical milieu—in this case intellectual life in post-War New York—by telling a particular story. The story is that of City College in the 1930s and 1940s, known as “the Jewish Harvard,” where the sons…
Simon Birch, written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson with a “suggested by” credit to John Irving for A Prayer for Owen Meany, is one of those self-consciously uplifting films, like The Spitfire Grill or Fried Green Tomatoes, that leave one feeling manipulated and disgusted. Like them it has been conceived and designed and put…
“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…
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