Remember the Night (1940)

Anywhere But Here, Wayne Wang’s adaptation to the screen of a novel by Mona Simpson, is a total chick-flick but still worth seeing for the terrific performances of Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman as the mother and daughter whose troubled relationship it is all about. In fact, the greatness of these two performances rather exaggerates…

What makes Tim Story’s film so good as moral instruction is what makes it, um, not quite so good as a movie.

David Mamet’s State and Main is so slow moving, so sluggishly edited, that you’ve got to wonder if it is so through incompetence — though this might be OK for other kinds of films, it’s disastrous in a comedy — or if there is some subtle purpose to it: an attempt to assert, for example,…

Steven Spielberg’s watchable but naïve and incoherent account of the revenge by Israel for the murder of its Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972

A well made Spanish film about a couple of prostitutes that flirts a little too blatantly with sentimentalism

A charming, unpretentious little movie from Mexico that gradually reveals to us hidden depths and a surprising emotional power