Three Days of the Condor

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…

[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 10, 2013] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Central Station, a Brazilian film directed by Walter Salles, stars the marvelous Fernanda Montenegro as Dora (real name, Isadora Teixera) a retired schoolteacher who makes her living by writing letters for illiterates who stream through the main train station in Rio de Janeiro. Many of the letters she simply throws away, knowing that the hopeless…

Jailed for arson? Poor Danny! Don’t you know he did it for our vanishing wilderness? Soft-core propaganda from the environmentalist left.

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

Set, like Rory O’Shea Was Here, in a nursing home, Elliot Greenbaum’s debut is a young man’s film but still worth seeing.