King’s Row (1942)

If you could legitimately take, as some reviewers seem illegitimately to have done, the final words of the Pakistani convenience store clerk, Nazir Chowdray (Ajay Naidu), in SubUrbia as the real direction in which the film is heading, it would not have been at all a bad picture — though written by Eric Bogosian (from…

Jim Jarmusch finds his alter ego in Bill Murray and his cinematic vision in the burn-out’s 1000 yard stare

Jason Bourne stands for the exquisite conscience of liberal America which, when geostrategic necessity comes calling, can only cry out that they should have left us alone

The Daytrippers by Greg Mottola is quite a pleasant little film. An actor’s film. There are excellent performances from Liev Schreiber, Parker Posey, Anne Meara, Hope Davis, Campbell Scott, and Pat McNamara especially, but credit must also be given to Mr. Mottola, a young man just out of film school who conceived such good parts…

Dr Doolittle, directed by Betty Thomas, stars Eddie Murphy as the eponymous doctor who can talk to the animals. For the nineties, all the whimsy of Hugh Lofting’s literary creation and the earlier film version starring Rex Harrison has given way to post-modern joking as celebrity voices are put into animal mouths and made to…

“She was too good for this life. . .” wrote Philip Larkin of the graffiti-covered bathing beauty on the advertising poster for “Sunny Prestatyn” and his ironic pity came to mind as I watched Gillian Anderson piling up the pathos as Lily Bart in Terence Davies’s screen adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of…