Badlands (1973)

An old-fashioned sort of cop story — that is, one in which the cops are the good guys — but one told in a hip, bang up-to-date, semi-ironic style

The Diary of a Seducer, by Dani le Dubroux, is a clever little movie based loosely on Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer. The diary in this case exists in two forms. One is as a French translation of Kierkegaard which Grégoire (Melvil Poupaud), a young philosophy student who lives with his crazy grandmother, Diane, a…

A rare success among many attempts to make a movie which has the heroic heft of epic verse

The most important question to be asked about Stepmom, directed by Chris Columbus, is why on earth Ed Harris was cast as the male lead, Lawyer Luke, who was married to the gorgeous Susan Sarandon and is now about to marry the gorgeous Julia Roberts. It makes no sense. There is no chemistry at all…

A Bug’s Life, directed by John Lasseter “with co-direction by Andrew Stanton” and the usual array of celebrity voices including Kevin Spacey as the bad guy and Phyllis Diller as the ant-queen, is that by-now familiar Hollywood phenomenon, a movie about movies. The fact prompts the reflection that the American entertainment industry is so big…

City of Angels by Brad Silberling is a remake of Wim Wenders’s The Wings of Desire which takes many of Wenders’s best ideas and puts them in the service of a standard issue, Hollywood chick flick—a Wallis Simpson fantasy about some big shot guy who gives up everything for a gal. And what a lot…