Train, The (1964)

An exciting and well-made movie about American soldiers at war in Iraq which doesn’t condescend to them — but which also doesn’t treat them as being quite real

Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the creative force behind A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles), has always been a quirky director. In fact, “quirky” is putting it mildly. His early films, Delicatessen (1991) and City of Lost Children (1995) often seem like illustrations for the definition of “post-modern” proposed by Moe Sislak of “The Simpsons,”…

Never a big fan of the late Stanley Kubrick’s, I went to see Eyes Wide Shut with no very great expectations. As in so many of Kubrick’s films, the cineaste predominates over the dramatist or the moralist. He is one of those directors — Bertolucci is another — whose approach to the movies is what…

One of the classics from the great days of the earnest “intellectual spectaculars” of the 1960s comes to the Film Forum

Starship Troopers directed by Paul Verhoeven and based on the book by Robert Heinlein is a custom-made vehicle for the expression of what I take to be the Hollywood worldview. In the fanciful future utopia it conjures up for us, the fearsome tide of poor, dirty, low class, and superstitious people, with skins both swarthy…

Beautiful People, written and directed by Jasmin Dizdar, is what we might call a Rodney King movie—a relatively harmless, feel-good concoction of a familiar kind which asks, rhetorically, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Of course, neither Jasmin Dizdar nor Rodney King is interested in any answer there may be to their question. Instead,…