Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942)

[See “How Hollywood Lost Its Romantic Groove,” The Wall Street Journal of February 9th, 2007, under “Articles”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

God Said, “Ha!” written, directed and performed by Julia Sweeney, formerly the androgynous “Pat” on “Saturday Night Live,” is a one-woman show consisting of the author’s personal account of a difficult year in her life when her younger brother was dying of lymphatic cancer, she herself was being treated for cervical cancer, she was out…

The one slightly sour note in Nora Ephron’s cloyingly sweet Julie & Julia comes near the end of the film when one of our two heroines, Julie Powell (Amy Adams), has become a hit with the public — or at least enough of a hit to realize the prospect of the book deal which will…

The Sixth Day, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, is a movie about cloning that is itself a clone — a genetic duplicate of every other Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle of the last 15 or 20 years. Actually, it is a clone of a clone of a clone, since the Schwarzenegger movie is itself a clone of a…

A haunting account of an act of terrorism from an age which, in retrospect, seems relatively free of it

If John Woo thinks, as the publicity material claims, that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai is “the closest thing to a perfect movie that I have ever seen” I wonder why he does not make movies like it himself? In fact, Le Samourai, made in 1967 but only seen in this country before in the wake…