Hurt Locker, The (2008)

Perhaps not the best of the recent crop of movies about grief, this Israeli film is nevertheless very watchable

American Psycho is as a movie as it was as a book, not a serious work of art but merely something designed to be talked about in the media and thus to confer money and celebrity upon its now plural authors. This is important, because not all books or movies that are talked about in…

Tea With Mussolini is, like so many other works by its director and co- writer (with John Mortimer) Franco Zeffirelli, for movie-goers with rather more of a sweet-tooth than I generally find I have. Adapted from Zeffirelli’s autobiography, it tells the story of a small Italian boy called Luca (played as a child by Charlie…

When the Cat’s Away (not a very adequate translation of the French Chacun Cherche Son Chat or “Everyone’s looking for his cat”), by Cédric Klapisch, is a charmingly old-fashioned kind of film, in spite of its depiction of very contemporary social realities. It offers a marvelously undimmed romanticism about Paris, and about the glamour of…

A heroic German dissident of the Second World War partially overcomes the recent antipathy of the movies towards religious heroes

A film that tries to sell its anti-war message by making American soldiers in Iraq into victim-heroes. Haven’t we seen this somewhere before?