Train, The (1964)

The Dinner Game, as the untranslatable Dîner de Cons is awkwardly but decorously rendered, is an uproarious French farce by Francis Veber, co-author of La Cage Aux Folles and creator on his own of a number of other plays and films in a similar style. It tells the story of Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte), a…

A movie that just goes to show you that the virtues of understatement can be overstated

Guys & Balls (Männer wie wir), directed by Sherry Horman and written by Benedikt Gollhardt, is based on the perennial gay fantasy of the latent homosexuality of those involved in such manly pursuits as soccer — or football as it is known to the rest of the world. Ecki (Maximilian Brückner) is the goalie for Boldrup…

Just imagine what you would get if the director of Trainspotting turned his hand to romantic comedy and, sure enough, that’s pretty much what you get with Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary. As with Trainspotting and their earlier hit, Shallow Grave, Boyle is joined by Andrew Macdonald (producer) and John Hodge (writer), but by…

As Enchanted April showed a few years ago, Italy is the promised land for the cold, sexually-repressed, work- obsessed Englishman or, more likely, Englishwoman. At least it is for the English who imagine themselves as having been kitted out by their climate or their religion or their national character with such a load of what…

Alice et Martin, directed and co-written by André Techiné, is an unconventional romance of a type that the French are so good at, but it is also a complex psychological drama which, I think, loses itself in its own complexities. At the level of the cinematic or dramatic detail it is a fine film. The…