Train, The (1964)

It is with some reluctance that I add my voice to the chorus of praise that has greeted Chicken Run, the latest from Nick Park’s and Peter Lord’s Aardman animation shop (now operating under the aegis of DreamWorks). It would have been more satisfying to think of this film as I had grown used to…

The Saint, starring Val Kilmer and Elizabeth Shue and directed by Phillip Noyce is simply one more Hollywood wish-fulfilment fantasy for teenage boys — full of gadgetry, secret identities, revenge against authority and beautiful but compliant females — and therefore of negligible interest to those with a more general interest in the art of cinema….

Nearly three hours long and slow to get started, Yi Yi, (“A one and a two. . .”), a Taiwanese domestic epic by the writer-director Edward Yang, is nevertheless worth waiting out. By the end, it does what only the best movies do, which is to make us care so much about its characters that…

Everything that is important in Girl, Interrupted, directed by James Mangold and based on the memoir by Suzanna Kaysen, can be condensed into one comment by the mental institution attendant, Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg) as she attempts to give the reluctant Suzanna (Winona Ryder) a bath. “This place is a f****** fascist torture chamber,” says the…

Enemy at the Gates, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, aspires to the Saving Private Ryan level of spectacle, but offers a bit more in the way of dramatic coherence. What a curious way it has, however, of representing for us the vast slaughterhouse of the Battle of Stalingrad—that is, as a solo duel between a Russian…

A bit of pro-abortion propaganda that can’t stick to propaganda — and so manages to rise above its ideology to near greatness