King’s Row (1942)

John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes makes the typical mistake of movies that attempt to satirize the celebrity-obsessed media culture of which, inevitably, they themselves are a part. In fact, so reliably do movies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers or Costa Gavras’s Mad City get it wrong that the suspicious-minded might be tempted to think that…

This is a young man’s movie, but one which even many young people are likely to find very tedious

An imperfect attempt to merge Irish blarney with heroism but worth seeing for the funny dialogue

An inspiring account of a coach’s dedication and a high school football team’s success which rather underplays its chief insight into the importance of character

Artistic innovation tends to follow a pattern, which begins with the reaction of the young rebels against the prevailing style, after its tricks become too familiar. So Wordsworth and Coleridge’s manifesto in the preface to the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads drew attention to the tired “poetic diction” of the time and called for a…

A chick-flick for women of a certain age — and a certain age greater than their emotional one