They Were Expendable (1945)

A political screed masquerading as a documentary about the crisis in consumer credit

At one point in Proof of Life, directed by Taylor Hackford, Alice Bowman (Meg Ryan) — who, by the way, is the second movie heroine in a month to share my name — asks Terry Thorne (Russell Crowe), the hot-shot K & R (Kidnap and Ransom) specialist negotiating for the release of her kidnapped husband,…

Hollywood producers have always been a prey to the delusion that what makes great novels great are their stories, or their characters or their “ideas”—things whose transfer to celluloid is fairly straightforward. But as Stéphane Mallarmé once said of poems, novels are not made of ideas but of words. Without Dickens’s words, Great Expectations is…

Anaconda by Luis Llosa is a riot of special effects but as dramatically negligible as you would expect. If you haven’t seen it, see if you can answer the following questions about it. 1. The expedition up the Amazon is (a) to shoot big game, (b) to capture big snakes to sell to zoos, (c)…

I didn’t bother going to see Fight Club when it came out in October because, having seen Seven and The Game, the earlier films by its director, David Fincher, I thought I knew what to expect: namely, bargain basement nihilism and pseudo-profundities got up into an “edgy” package with “edgy” music and featuring big stars…

Another example of Hollywood’s bizarre idea of what military life and education are like