Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942)

The Locusts, written and directed by John Patrick Kelley, is a tedious Freudian melodrama which, like so much else that comes out of Hollywood these days, bends every effort to convince us of the awful secrets buried beneath those smiling, happy-families exteriors of the 1950s. Such a belief in the real hideousness of apparent domestic…

In Ride With the Devil, the great Taiwanese director Ang Lee shows once again that he has a kind of genius for the old Hollywood trick of adapting second-rank fiction to the big screen. This is not meant to be a put-down. First rank fiction very rarely makes a first rank movie. What to my…

A portrait of modern sanctity which — very oddly, in my view — asks not to be taken too seriously

In The Memory of a Killer, also known as The Alzheimer Case (De Zaak Alzheimer), Erik Van Looy has done a nice job of putting together an engaging, high-concept thriller. But once we’ve finished being caught up in it, we can’t help noticing that the high-concept pretty much goes to waste. It is this. A…

A harrowing but at the same time politically and morally tendentious retelling of events on board the fourth hijacked plane of 9/11, and the only one not to reach its objective.

Marie Baie Des Anges by Manual Pradal stars Vahina Giocante as 15 year old Marie and Frederic Malgras as her juvenile delinquent boyfriend Orso. It is a sort of French Kids, that egregious film of a couple of years ago which enjoyed a brief renown as the very latest in “reality” cinema. This is a…