King’s Row (1942)

Brother, a Russian film written and directed by Alexei Balabanov, stars Sergei Bodrov, Jr, as Danila, a recently discharged soldier at a loose end who makes his way to St. Petersburg where his brother, Viktor (Victor Suhorukov) is somebody in the burgeoning underworld of Russia’s second city. The city itself is a main character in…

A disappointing parody of a horror flick which offers only a glance at in the direction of real-world satire before getting down to the routine business of dragging someone to hell

This might have been a striking parable of the plight of young people today, if only the film-makers could have seen a little further beyond its absurdities

The Locusts, written and directed by John Patrick Kelley, is a tedious Freudian melodrama which, like so much else that comes out of Hollywood these days, bends every effort to convince us of the awful secrets buried beneath those smiling, happy-families exteriors of the 1950s. Such a belief in the real hideousness of apparent domestic…

Don Diego (Anthony Hopkins), the aristocratic settler in Spanish California who dons The Mask of Zorro to fight against his aristocratic brethren and for the people as “Zorro,” the fox, is a man of apparently no politics, though he repeatedly risks his life, no internal conflicts, in spite of being “a traitor to your country…

A very watchable film with a highly unoriginal Big Idea about the origins of war and violence