Full Metal Jacket (1987)

A fascinating document for future scholars writing the history of the American celebrity culture

I tried very hard to like Henry Fool by Hal Hartley and was intermittently successful, but I found it in the end unsatisfying. The film tells the story of two friends, the rogue Henry Fool (“there used to be an ‘e’ on the end of it in the 17th century, but it dropped off”), played…

Harold Ramis is a fine comic writer-director, and his Groundhog Day will go down in cinematic history as one of the great American classic films. But with his adaptation of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Bedazzled of 1967 (directed by Stanley Donen), he has bitten off more than he can chew. Together with Larry Gelbart…

[See “Entry from June 25, 2008” under “My Diary”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

The Boxer by Jim Sheridan deserves some praise for being one of the very few among the spate of recent movies about “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland (including Sheridan’s own) that actually tries to depict the I.R.A. as it is and not with the romantic patina of Michael Collins or, most recently, The Jackal. But…

It’s not easy, being human. The older you get the more you understand this. It doesn’t get any harder, necessarily, but at some point, usually in middle age, you realize how hard it has been all along. Agnès Jaoui’s delightful film, Le Goût des Autres or The Taste of Others is about such an epiphany…