Manchurian Candidate, The (1962)

A charming statement of the rationalist case against honor and glory and big men and big ideas. If only it were true!

A charming Australian coming-of-age tale in which Brenda Blethyn gets to polish up and make more sympathetic her now-familiar screen persona as a loud, vulgar woman of the lower classes

Near the end of Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro), Marcel Camus’s masterpiece of 1959, there comes what can only be described as an authorial disclaimer that strikes the film’s one seriously false note. “The happiness of the poor is the great illusion of Carnival,” we are told, more or less out of the blue. Up until…

An often funny revenge fantasy for wronged women which either doesn’t know about or can’t allow itself to show its more serious side

A girl who pretends to be deaf and a real bad dad don’t end up adding very much of interest to a routine high school melodrama

Amazon, the IMAX film now being shown at the Museum of Natural History in New York, begins with scenes from an old black and white movie of pith-helmeted explorers fighting everything from vicious natives with poison-dart blowguns, to crocodiles to piranha. The picture is a tiny keyhole in the middle of the screen. Then up…