Full Metal Jacket (1987)

A self-consciously Christian parable at odds with its own realistic setting

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,…

A pretty routine bit of Hollywood uplift in the sporting context which isn’t quite sure about what it really believes

One must naturally applaud the highly moral purpose of a movie like Boiler Room, written and directed by Ben Younger. Out of appreciation for it, one can almost ignore the rap music and the suffocating hipness and, with them, the suspicion that like its model, Wall Street, the film really glorifies what it ostensibly disapproves…

A harrowing account of the brutal Japanese occupation of the Chinese capital in 1937, of which few are left alive to tell the tale

Perhaps the emblematic scene of Iain Softley’s adaptation (written by Hossein Amini) of Henry James’s Wings of the Dove comes as Millie Theale (Alison Elliott) and Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter) meet Merton Densher (Linus Roache) in an exhibition of the erotic art of Egon Schiele (by coincidence, such an exhibition is being shown at…