Manchurian Candidate, The (1962)

Very Bad Things, written and directed by Peter Berg, aspires to be a black comedy but it forgets to be comic. The title is a true enough description of what is to be found inside, but as none of the bad things are also funny, the movie itself is merely. . .a bad thing. Jon…

A bleak portrait of the still-primitive mountain society of the Ozarks but one notable for a remarkable character-study of its heroine

Yet more corruption in the LAPD makes you wonder if there are criminals in Los Angeles who aren’t wearing a badge

All the way through The Winter Guest, which was directed and co-written by the fine British actor Alan Rickman, I was bothered by the fact that the action (I use the term loosely) was supposed to be taking place on “the coldest day in living memory” in East Fife, Scotland. Anyone who has ever been…

Another weird but weirdly captivating film from the Austrian director, Michael Haneke. Is this guy for real?

Robert Altman’s new picture, Cookie’s Fortune, is like all his films in having in it a lot of good things pushed to—and usually way beyond—their limit. Here the relentless folksiness of the sleepy Mississippi town, Holly Springs, is truly charming most of the time, but on occasion it becomes almost enough to give Andy Griffith…