King’s Row (1942)

Even raw propaganda can do the rounds of the documentary circuit, apparently, so long as it is anti-American propaganda

The Astronaut’s Wife, by Rand Ravich, is like the Alien movies in being a kind of mythologization of modern female insecurities about sex and childbearing. Commander Spencer Armacost (Johnny Depp) is a mystery from the beginning. Apparently deeply attached to his wife, Jillian (Charlize Theron), to the point of uxoriousness, he is also very much…

Bruce Beresford does so many things so well that he should by rights be one of the best directors of our time. But there is a certain coarseness to his sensibility, a weakness for the sentimental cliché, which often comes near to vitiating even his best work. His latest film, Paradise Road, though I don’t…

A beautiful and profound meditation on the claims of a very little, very fragile human life upon eternity

Amazing! An old-fashioned drama of honor and faith and romance and swordplay not intended to send these things up.

The iron rule in Hollywood is that if you’ve got a hit, you’ve got to have a sequel. But what happens when the hit depends, as last year’s Blair Witch Project did, on a necessarily temporary illusion of reality? Fool me once and I’ll give you a good review; fool me twice and I’m an…