Hurt Locker, The (2008)

A Chef in Love (or, to give it its French title, Le Mille et Un Recettes d’un Cuisinier Amoureux) by Nana Djordjadze is a Franco-Georgian film which takes the fast-track to success by foreign language films: include lots of food. Set in the Caucasus in 1920, it is the story of a French chef, Pascal…

It’s nice to know, as I’m sure I’ve said before, that somewhere in the world life on celluloid is still an earnest business and not a sly, postmodern in-joke as it has so largely become in the pampered West. You might have to go to China, however, still not recovered from nearly 50 years of…

Niagara Niagara directed by Bob Gosse, is what we might call a sick flick which reproduces in its title the “echolalia” or weird repetitions and irrational tics incident to sufferers of Tourette’s Syndrome. The sufferer in this case is a young woman called Marcy (Robin Tunney) from a wealthy but uncaring family who meets (while…

Me Myself I, written and directed by Pip Karmel, is a sort of Australian version of Sliding Doors but with little of its prototype’s wit or cleverness. Everybody’s favorite bouncing Aussie lass, Rachel Griffiths (who, like Toni Collette, sprang to international stardom out of Muriel’s Wedding) plays a 30-something journalist in Sydney called Pam Drury….

As one of America’s greatest fans of Antipodean film-making, I am sorry not to be able to heap praise upon Oscar and Lucinda by Gillian Armstrong, but I’m afraid it is just too chaotic a film, morally and intellectually, to present us with a pleasing cinematic completeness. I suspect that this is a deficiency owing…

Run Lola Run, written and directed by Tom Tykwer, is the kind of film for which critics must have invented the word “stylish.” It is so stylish in fact that it thinks it has nothing to do but to be stylish. And indeed many critics seem to have forgiven it all its many little incoherences…