In Which We Serve (1942)

An immensely moving account of goodness, holiness and Christian martyrdom — remember that? — amid a political landscape much like our own

Idle Hands, directed by Rodman Flender (can there really be someone with such a name?), is another in the recent spate of teen movies. With what can only be considered predictable unsuccess, it tries to marry the old-fashioned, rather campy moralism of the old-time teen slasher movie with the hip, happenin’, po-mo wit of Scream….

Payback is directed by Brian Helgeland, who was one of the writers involved in L.A. Confidential, and, like that film, this one is an exercise in ersatz film noir. It is not exactly a remake of John Boorman’s Point Blank of 1967, but both are based on the same novel, The Hunter, which was written…

A film that tries to sell its anti-war message by making American soldiers in Iraq into victim-heroes. Haven’t we seen this somewhere before?

Chris Rock’s adaptation of — of all people — Eric Rohmer is often funny but morally and dramatically incoherent.

Breakdown by Jonathan Mostow is a superior sort of thriller that is a step in the right direction after recent Hollywood examples of the genre—that is, in the direction of the things that ordinary, reasonable people really do fear. Which is to say not unbelievably big Amazonian snakes or volcanos erupting in downtown Los Angeles…