Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942)

Requiem for a Dream, directed by Darren Aronofsky (Pi) from a script he wrote with Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and based on the latter’s novel, has a promising beginning. We see Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) stealing his own mother’s television set in order to pawn it for drug money. His mother, Sara…

A couple of months ago I picked Stigmata the front-runner in the Worst-Movie-of-the Year Stakes, but Kevin Smith’s disastrously awful Dogma has now blown by it in the stretch and is cantering towards the finish several lengths ahead of the field. Since his promising debut with Clerks (1994), Smith has been going steadily downhill in…

Wild Man Blues by Barbara Kopple is a documentary about Woody Allen and a pickup band and their tour of Europe to play New Orleans jazz. The deal must have been for Barbara to come along and get lots of shots of Woody and Soon-Yi, suitable for tabloid TV, in exchange for making Woody look…

Well, here goes. The following, I know, is an invitation to hate-mail, but I have to say that Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, written and directed by George Lucas, demonstrates a remarkable paucity of imagination. The thought first came to me in the scene where Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) explains to Queen Amidala…

A much too long and incoherent but always watchable journey into the ever-stranger country of the 1970s.

A too-busy but still enjoyable account of part of the life of the author of The Adventures of Peter Rabbit