Black Hawk Down (2001)

A moving and beautiful portrait of the natural bond between teacher and pupils that is also a stealth critique of today’s educational orthodoxy

Always worth watching, the Coen Brothers tell us, as they have done so often in the past, that truth is elusive and life is absurd. But this is old news.

Like A Merry War, the adaptation of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying that came out last year, Metroland, directed by Philip Saville and adapted by Adrian Hodge from the novel by Julian Barnes, in the end boils down to a pretty banal discovery of the obvious. For some reason, perhaps the historical accident of…

Just imagine what you would get if the director of Trainspotting turned his hand to romantic comedy and, sure enough, that’s pretty much what you get with Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary. As with Trainspotting and their earlier hit, Shallow Grave, Boyle is joined by Andrew Macdonald (producer) and John Hodge (writer), but by…

Like most Hollywood attempts at satire, Dick, directed by Andrew Fleming, falls into the fatal trap of becoming too cozy with the object of its satirical attentions. This is a pity because there are many good and funny things in it. It would have been a great movie if it could have kept its focus…

A progressive parable from a rather unlikely place