Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942)

Bossa Nova, an adaptation of a story by Sérgio Sant’Anna (“A Senhorita Simpson”) by the Brazilian director Bruno Barreto, seems to have been conceived as a vehicle for the latter’s wife, the former Mrs. Steven Spielberg, Amy Irving. She plays Mary Anne, an American widow living in Rio and teaching English to upwardly mobile Cariocas,…

Ed Burns, a born movie-star rather than an actor, is a confirmed narcissist and therefore the last man in the world to be playing a confidence man

She’s So Lovely was directed by Nick Cassavetes from a screenplay by his late father, John Cassavetes, and provides a showcase for the talents of Sean Penn and his real-life wife, Robin Wright Penn, in classic Cassavetes situations of groups of friends sitting around, getting drunk together, laughing and saying the sorts of things that…

Being John Malkovich, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze is a hilariously funny movie which also has some interesting things to say about art and artistry and love and sex and would probably even have interesting things to say about celebrity, too, if it were still possible to say anything interesting on…

Lovers of the Arctic Circle is a handsomely constructed fable of love and destiny, written and directed by Julio Medem. Those with a taste for magic realism or the sunny po-mo fables of Jaco Van Dormael (Toto the Hero, The Eighth Day) may well enjoy it, though to my taste its weird Spanish romanticism and…

An amusing and occasionally wise and witty film from Patrice Leconte, but one whose principal virtue is its leading man