King’s Row (1942)

Almost everyone can enjoy a really dumb movie once in a while, but it would seem to be a minimum requirement that it at least be funny.

Intimate Relations written and directed by Philip Goodhew is a lovely black comedy, supposedly based on a true story, which shines with brilliant performances by Rupert Graves and Julie Walters. Mr Graves plays Harold Guppy, a bit of a ne’er-do-well who, after stints in the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy, comes to Abergavenny on…

A bit of determined uplift that would be more effective if it didn’t try so hard

Gekko No Sasayaki or “Moonlight Whispers” is a brilliant little Japanese film, written and directed by Akihiko Shiota, about young love which suddenly spins out of control and becomes sexual perversion. Not a very promising subject, you might think, and the quasi-clinical dimension of the film, though it has a serious point to make, is…

In The Hurricane, Norman Jewison is going through the motions. His film takes an ostensibly true story which also conforms to a classic movie situation—a man condemned for a crime he did not commit—and allows our expectations to do all the work. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington) was a top middleweight contender in the mid-1960s…

John Frankenheimer’s new movie, Reindeer Games, for which Ehren Kruger (Arlington Road) wrote the screenplay, is in some ways an admirably old-fashioned sort of picture. Or so I am inclined to think of any movie whose soul is its plot, as it generally is in the movies of the greatest directors from Hitchcock to Rohmer….