Manchurian Candidate, The (1962)

When J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World had its premiere in Dublin in 1907 there were riots in the streets because the play was thought to be a vicious slander on the Irish people. Synge had seemed to suggest that it was characteristic of the Irish blarney, at least among the rural folk that…

[See “Entry from June 24, 2009” under “My Diary”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

The Opportunists by Myles Connell is a pleasant surprise. To some extent, it represents a throwback to the good old days in Hollywood when even the most hard-boiled gangster movies, or movies later taken to have glorified the criminal life, could be relied upon to portray a moral world characterized by inflexible certainty about what…

Air Force One by Wolfgang Petersen is a superior example of its kind, the disaster movie cum thriller featuring national security and political issues of a kind that Hollywood invariably gets wrong. This film is no exception. It posits a warlord ruler of Kazakhstan who threatens world peace by turning his desperately poor country into…

The Hollywood in-joke of presenting Jack Nicholson as a therapist for angry people takes this movie a long way, but not long enough.

Anaconda by Luis Llosa is a riot of special effects but as dramatically negligible as you would expect. If you haven’t seen it, see if you can answer the following questions about it. 1. The expedition up the Amazon is (a) to shoot big game, (b) to capture big snakes to sell to zoos, (c)…