Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942)

The Inheritors written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, is a curious anachronism, borrowing its story (so it might seem) from some Communist propaganda tract of the 1930s—when it is ostensibly set. It tells the story of a group of Austrian peasants whose master, when he is murdered, is found to have willed his farm to…

Another cinematic exercise in drinking deep from the intoxicating stream of popular paranoia

Nil By Mouth by Gary Oldman is a surprise. You would think that Hollywood’s favorite maniac villain — along with Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken — would have been infected with the Hollywood slicks, but here, in his first appearance as director, he is doing something altogether different — that is a sort of cinéma…

Star Trek: Insurrection, directed by Jonathan Frakes, is another black- box movie — which is to say a movie that elevates the deus ex machina into a guiding principle. I know that I risk offending a lot of Trekkies who are used to this kind of thing, but I find it merely boring. Every time…

If it looks as if the stock of anti-Iraq War movies is drying up, you can always re-release an old anti-Vietnam War movie and no one will know the difference

A remarkably sympathetic portrayal of the early life of St. Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei — though it gains nothing from being tangled up with a fictional romance