They Were Expendable (1945)

The good news about Go, written by John August and directed by Douglas Liman (Swingers) is that it is the best of the scores of imitations of Quentin Tarantino that have appeared since Pulp Fiction set the standard for hip postmodernism at the movies in 1994. It is therefore the hippest movie you can see…

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…

Another cinematic exercise in drinking deep from the intoxicating stream of popular paranoia

You can see why the novel The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacqueline Mitchard made such a hit as the first selection of the Oprah book club and why its film version, directed by Ulu Grosbard from a script by Stephen Schiff, will doubtless be the chick flick of the season. There’s a child…

When Shakespeare decided to put a trio of witches into Macbeth he knew that their very presence would suggest to his audience something fearful beyond imagining. They were a kind of algebraic symbol for the unknown quantity of evil which the play, in more realistic fashion, attempted to solve for. Nowadays, the presence of witches…

The introductory disclaimer to the Dreamworks animated blockbuster, The Prince of Egypt (directed by Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells) notifies us that the film has taken some “historical license” but that it has been “true to the essence, values and integrity” of the Exodus story. In literal terms this is true, but in…