They Were Expendable (1945)

Beautiful People, written and directed by Jasmin Dizdar, is what we might call a Rodney King movie—a relatively harmless, feel-good concoction of a familiar kind which asks, rhetorically, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Of course, neither Jasmin Dizdar nor Rodney King is interested in any answer there may be to their question. Instead,…

Hotel de Love by Craig Rosenberg is, like Cosi, a fresh and amusing Australian film that puts Hollywood schlock like Fools Rush In to shame. It tells the story of twin brothers, Rick (Aden Young, who also plays Nick in Cosi) and Stephen (Simon Bossell) who fall in love with the same girl, Melissa (Saffron…

Even the kids who love this stuff might want to start thinking about putting away childish things

The Harmonists, directed by Joseph Vilsmaier, is the “based-on-a-true story” story of The Comedian Harmonists, an immensely popular singing group in pre-war Germany that eventually had to break up, as three of its six members were Jewish. Like nearly every other film set in its time and place, this one is ultimately sucked into the…

It used to be that Warner Brothers cartoons were an antidote to the unbearable sugary fakery of Disney and his horrible Mickey Mouse. No longer. The Disney monster is reaching out its tentacles to take over everything, apparently. Or so we might think to watch Warner’s clone of a Disney feature cartoon in The Quest…

Unmade Beds by Nicholas Barker is the sort of picture I would normally hate: a kind of heightened documentary that is not really, as it purports to be, straightforward interviews with four single adults in New York but rather staged interviews in which each of the subjects has been given a chance to work up…