Full Metal Jacket (1987)

An occasionally amusing parable of guilt and forgiveness whose setting in small-town America, like the prejudices of its author, does it no favors

The latest Coen brothers film is a remake of a 1955 classic that seems not to notice that the entire moral context of the original has vanished

Faust — as he appears in Playing God and Devil’s Advocate — appears to be all the rage in Hollywood at the moment. Coincidently, a Norwegian version of the Faust tale in Jan Troell’s Hamsun is knocking around out there somewhere at the moment. You may even get to see it if you live in…

Holy Man, written by Tom Schulman and directed by Stephen Herek at first looks as if it is going to be a more successful exercise in Hollywood metaphysics than the dreadful What Dreams May Come. Set in the cutthroat corporate world of the Good Buy Home shopping network, run by the splendidly nasty John McBainbridge…

The Designated Mourner, written by Wallace Shawn and directed by David Hare, is chiefly remarkable for the fact that it shows Mike Nichols can act. Or at least overact. It’s hard to tell if it is Mr Shawn’s overheated writing, Mr Hare’s spare, intense directing or Mr Nichols’s own natural hamminess, but the overall effect…

Charles Darwin re-imagined by today’s progressive-minded atheists as the patron saint of their cause