Manchurian Candidate, The (1962)

Well, here goes. The following, I know, is an invitation to hate-mail, but I have to say that Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, written and directed by George Lucas, demonstrates a remarkable paucity of imagination. The thought first came to me in the scene where Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) explains to Queen Amidala…

A Friend of the Deceased (Un Ami du Défunt), a Franco-Ukrainian film directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich and written—in Russian—by Andrei Kourkov, has a very attractive premiss. Tolia (Alexandre Lazarev), a translator living in Kiev and living a hand-to-mouth, hustling sort of existence not untypical of life in the former Soviet Union, finds that his rather…

Fallen, written by Nicholas Kazan and directed by Gregory Hoblit from the novel by Dawn Steele is an idiotic fantasy about a Biblical demon called Azazel who inhabits the body of a murderer named Edgar Reese (Elias Koteas). When Reese is executed for his crimes, the spirit of Azazel transmigrates into the bodies of various…

This silly and mindless remake of an American classic is a huge disappointment

An often funny, less-often satirical satire of the movie business which suffers from the usual weakness of its kind: it’s only kidding