Full Metal Jacket (1987)

The movies have in the past found it profitable to cater for almost every kind of paranoia there is. The California fantasy factories must be getting a lot of business out of even the survivalist types—who, you would think, must live many miles from the nearest Multiplex—since they managed to get some black helicopters into…

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon directed by the excellent Mr. Ang Lee is a sort of Charlie’s Angels for sophisticates. Good as Mr Lee is, one sometimes finds oneself observing of his films that they are very well done while asking oneself if, after all, they were unquestionably worth doing. So it is with this film,…

Carl Franklin’s — and Denzel Washington’s — best movie since Devil in a Blue Dress is a thriller that really thrills

A Merry War is the American title given to the adaptation by Robert Bierman (director) and Alan Plater (writer) of George Orwell’s sunniest novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying— presumably because Americans don’t know what an aspidistra is. For the record, it is a houseplant with long, leathery swordlike leaves which, in the 1930s was a…

There is more than a hint of political correctness about this film’s self-discoveries, which the audience will have figured out long before the characters do

City of Angels by Brad Silberling is a remake of Wim Wenders’s The Wings of Desire which takes many of Wenders’s best ideas and puts them in the service of a standard issue, Hollywood chick flick—a Wallis Simpson fantasy about some big shot guy who gives up everything for a gal. And what a lot…