Train, The (1964)

Trust Merchant-Ivory to find a way to transform the elegant and the sophisticated into the banal

Romanticism gives way to blatant sentimentalism in Nick Cassavetes’s tribute to lifelong love. . .

A festival of unashamed Hollywood fakery by a director who ought to know better

Waking Ned Devine, written and directed by Kirk Jones, is a delightfully funny and touching film that, I’m afraid, would not win the approval of Bill Bennett. It is about a crime — a fraud perpetrated on the Irish government by an entire Irish village which thus doubtless reveals its collective lack of character and…

Another immensely watchable film from Iran, in spite a slight tendency to promote civic responsibility

Lucie Aubrac by Claude Berri (the great director of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring), is another illustration of the use of cliché in great movie-making. Based on the true life events recorded in the memoir, Ils partiront dans l’ivresse by Lucie Aubrac herself, this film hits us over the head with its…