Three Days of the Condor

At the end of A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, as at the end of almost every Merchant-Ivory film I’ve ever seen, I said to myself: “What was the point of that?” I guess it’s a kind of trademark of theirs. In fact, the Soldier’s Daughter, based on a memoir by the daughter of the novelist…

Edward Burns’s young career as a director has gone from promising (The Brothers McMullin) to flabby (She’s the One) to utterly self-indulgent and silly in his latest and, I hope, last film, No Looking Back. The big idea here is to take that over-familiar and by now thoroughly boring conceit of the 1950s (most recently…

Though message-laden and inclined to a facile view of international politics, this is a fresh and funny look at the travails of family life

Almost everyone can enjoy a really dumb movie once in a while, but it would seem to be a minimum requirement that it at least be funny.

Pavilion of Women is possibly the most perfectly awful movie I have seen this year. It is also a sad indication of the extent to which Hollywood, in seeking to demonstrate liberal good-will towards the People’s Republic of China, will swallow without a murmur propaganda that would be laughed off the stage if it came…

A sort of post-modern tragedy — if that’s not a contradiction in terms — that is too faithful to the novel but will probably win lots of Oscars for it