Remember the Night (1940)

If it looks as if the stock of anti-Iraq War movies is drying up, you can always re-release an old anti-Vietnam War movie and no one will know the difference

The 12 year-old eponymous hero of Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot, played by Jamie Bell, is made to say more than once that “just ‘cause I like ballet it doesn’t mean I’m a poof.” Sounds reasonable to me. But the film itself has a different story to tell. Both the introduction of Billy’s cross-dressing schoolboy friend,…

Trust Merchant-Ivory to find a way to transform the elegant and the sophisticated into the banal

An enjoyable and well-made film from British director Mike Leigh which, nevertheless, doesn’t quite satisfy

Movie illnesses used to be the kind of thing that beautiful young women contracted. The silent killer was sure in its work, but it always left them looking in the pink when they finally breathed their last. They were still beautiful, but now also charged with pathos. Looking on them you might says, as Romeo…

Earlier this year, in a review of Panic by Henry Bromell, I observed that it was possible to appreciate a film which is an impressive bit of propaganda for a political position with which you profoundly disagree. Just think of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will. Nowadays, the most assiduous ideologues among film-makers are…