They Were Expendable (1945)

If, as I believe, the new media aristocracy is essentially the aristocracy of feeling, then Johnny Depp is the crown prince. Was ever a face more perfectly constructed to express our turn-of-the-century ideal of a fine vulnerability, a noble sensitivity to every emotional breeze that ripples its surface? Unfortunately, with looks like his there are…

An updating of a classic film of the 1940s goes badly astray in a now-familiar way — by turning its heroes into victims

An imperfect attempt to merge Irish blarney with heroism but worth seeing for the funny dialogue

Roman Polanski makes a political movie for the people — unfortunately, there are a lot of them, particularly in Europe — whose politics are just like his

Saving Grace, written by Craig Ferguson and Mark Crowdy and directed by Nigel Cole, I found a surprisingly charming and thoroughly entertaining film until about three quarters of the way through, when it lapsed into a tired druggy fantasy that made the rest of the thing look bad retrospectively. I think the key to making…

There is a certain kind of modern novel that is not really a novel at all but a series of ruminations on life, the universe and everything by a narrator who is a would-be philosopher and thinly disguised stand-in for the author. The master of this sort of ruminative fiction is Richard Ford, whose novels,…