Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942)

An absurd historical fantasy that accomplishes the impossible by making even its fellow Shakespeare authorship cranks look good by comparison

The movie itself is at best routine, but it is interesting to watch the rather un-p.c. reactions of the audience

Atom Egoyan’s curiously unemotional re-telling of the story of the Armenian massacres of 1915 loses itself in its inability to tear itself away from the present day.

The best comment on Howard Stern’s Private Parts came in the New Yorker cartoon that showed one rueful movie-goer saying to the other: “I think I hate liking Howard Stern even more than I liked hating him.” Here he presents himself, with the help of Betty (Brady Bunch) Thomas, as just a good old-fashioned, all-American…

Baz Luhrmann, director of Strictly Ballroom and Romeo+ Juliet seems with each film to be trying to outdo the absurdity and outrageousness of the last. If so, he’s going to have a hard time topping Moulin Rouge, which seems to me to go about as far as you can go with self-parody. He is reported…

Men in Black, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld from the comic book by Lowell Cunningham, is offered as a justification for weird sort of benign paranoia. The government, we are asked to believe, really knows all about the alien presence in our midst (that much is familiar) but they are keeping the knowledge of it from…