Remember the Night (1940)

A charming combination of prison flick and musical comedy is the best thing on offer this week.

Nights of Cabiria by Federico Fellini, recently re-released in a restored version, stars the great director’s wife, Giulietta Massina as the Roman prostitute, Cabiria, whose fortunes and misfortunes in the mid-1950s, must now seem to us to come from a world as long gone as Dante’s or Manzoni’s. All is now changed, changed utterly, since…

An ambivalent portrait of Ralph Nader contains a lesson for us all

Let’s Talk About Sex is written and directed by Troy Beyer, who also stars as Jazz, an agony aunt columnist in Miami who wants to be the host of a TV talk show called “Girl Talk.” Her getting the gig depends on her putting together a demo tape in only a few days, which starts…

. . .And speaking of witless sequels, Batman and Robin directed by Joel Schumacher is a pathetic document—un-clever and un-funny. And being un-clever and un-funny are the two cardinal sins for any such obvious attempt at postmodern filmmaking as a Batman sequel. Given that we’ve got to watch this kind of garbage (since Hollywood hardly…

The Designated Mourner, written by Wallace Shawn and directed by David Hare, is chiefly remarkable for the fact that it shows Mike Nichols can act. Or at least overact. It’s hard to tell if it is Mr Shawn’s overheated writing, Mr Hare’s spare, intense directing or Mr Nichols’s own natural hamminess, but the overall effect…