Black Hawk Down (2001)

Here is the basic idea of Arlington Road, written by Ehren Kruger and directed by Mark Pellington. A history professor called Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges), who teaches a course on terrorism, gradually realizes that his new neighbors in the pleasant suburb where he lives are terrorists. If that premiss strains your credulity just a little,…

Nettoyage à Sec (Dry Cleaning) by Anne Fontaine presents us with a French version of that now familiar Hollywood trope, merely gestured towards in 8mm, the capacity for sexual adventurism and even perversion in all of us. Nicole (Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie (Charles Berling) have been married for 15 years and run a dry-cleaning establishment in…

Playing God, directed by Andy Wilson and written by Mark Haskell Smith is yet another example of the work of the Taranteenies, those hip young filmmakers who have dominated creative thinking in Hollywood for the past three or four years, in the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s success with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. You’d think…

Like the earlier films by Nicole Holofcener this is witty and amusing and offers much for our enjoyment but, also like them, it evinces a feminism that can be slightly didactic

Some people are fiddling with one of the greatest classics of the American popular culture without, apparently, knowing what they’ve got their hands on

Whatever by Susan Skoog stars Liza Weil as Anna Stockard and Chad Morgan as her slutty friend Brenda, two high school girls in 1981 who do the standard “survivors” turn on behalf of the I-am-womanism of Ms Skoog. It follows the by-now familiar path of mythologizing and romanticising the sufferings of women, particularly young, post-pubertal…