Hurt Locker, The (2008)

A persuasive and watchable version of the 16^th president makes us not mind too much the reduction in scale of his great story from the epic to a grubby political wrangle

John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes makes the typical mistake of movies that attempt to satirize the celebrity-obsessed media culture of which, inevitably, they themselves are a part. In fact, so reliably do movies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers or Costa Gavras’s Mad City get it wrong that the suspicious-minded might be tempted to think that…

An interesting and authentic-looking account of men in combat in Afghanistan but one with a depressingly familiar anti-war subtext

Pity poor Pat Tillman, fated to be a posthumous propaganda tool for one side or the other in our increasingly graceless public dialogue on matters of war and peace

A well-made film that teaches an obnoxious lesson

Live Flesh by Pedro Almodovar begins with a scene, set on a lonely night in 1970, in which a baby is born on a bus on the way to the hospital. There is a comic bus driver and a comic older woman helping the baby be born. “If idiots like us didn’t give birth,” she…