Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942)

Deep Impact, directed by Mimi Leder from a script by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, is one of what I take to be a new breed of Hollywood disaster flicks. Modeled on Independence Day, these are apocalyptic in scale, overburdened with special effects and pitched to a younger teen audience, but they are still…

Pushing Tin, directed by Mike Newell, is a reminder that our popular culture wants it both ways. On the one hand it thrives, as entertainment has always done, on the competition of macho men to see who is stronger, smarter, quicker or more dexterous. On the other hand it feels constrained to deplore such competition…

Event Horizon written by Philip Eisner and directed by Paul Anderson, is set in 2047 and stars Laurence Fishburne as Miller, the captain of a rescue space ship called USAC Lewis and Clark which is going to see what happened to another ship, the Event Horizon, that got lost on a trip to the stars…

Another indication, along with Black Hawk Down (but not Hart’s War), that the era of war movies in which the soldiers are either victims or psychopathic killers may be over.

You’ve got to hand it to Nicole Kassell and Kevin Bacon, for in making a hero of a child molester they haven’t taken the easy way to pleasing audiences

A good old-fashioned melodrama in not-so-good new-fashioned disguise