Train, The (1964)

Déjà Vu, directed by Henry Jaglom, stars the director’s wife, Victoria Foyt, as Dana, an American in Israel on a buying trip who meets a woman in a café who tells her a sad story of her life. “We were soulmates,” she tells her. “He was the love of my life.” But “life got hold…

I expected Enemy of the State, directed by Tony Scott, to be one more document in the tedious succession of conspiracy-theory movies that has pretty much dominated Hollywood’s view of politics since the 1970s. It is that, certainly. Once again, a rogue official of the government controls a vast army of sinister intent and apparently…

The People vs. Larry Flynt is one of Hollywood’s more typical propaganda films—which is to say one which makes it too easy on itself. Unlike, say, Dead Man Walking, which was a very untypical propaganda film, it does not play straight with us. It stacks the deck in favor of its hero, Larry Flynt (Woody…

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…

[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 12, 2012] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

The good news about Go, written by John August and directed by Douglas Liman (Swingers) is that it is the best of the scores of imitations of Quentin Tarantino that have appeared since Pulp Fiction set the standard for hip postmodernism at the movies in 1994. It is therefore the hippest movie you can see…