Badlands (1973)

I hope it will not sound too relativistic of me to say that each age has its own moral needs. In the late Victorian era people needed to hear—though not nearly so much as they might have needed to hear a few years earlier or later—that mercy and forgiveness and forbearance to sinners was holy…

Normally, I make it a rule never to go to basketball movies (especially if they star basketball players) or those whose titles are in ebonics. But Spike Lee is a talented director about whose work it is still possible to be hopeful, in spite of a string of disappointments. He Got Game turns out to…

Peeping Tom by Michael Powell first appeared in this country in 1960, and it is often compared with Psycho, the work of another British-born filmmaker from the same year. But where Psycho was widely regarded as its auteur’s masterpiece, Peeping Tom got such a critical slating that it all but ended Powell’s career prematurely. Nowadays…

Lethal Weapon 4 was, according to the credits, directed by Richard Donner, but it might as well have been directed by a computer. Here is the perfect summer blockbuster movie in which the formulae perfected in the first three installments in the series are employed once again, the explosions and the hair-breadth escapes are even…

You’ve got to be thinking: isn’t one inspirational, sensitive, meaningful, caring, profound movie starring Robin Williams enough for one year? At least, could we keep it down to twice a year? At present we’re getting them at a clip of one every other month and it does seem a tear too much. It was only…

John Sayles preaches yet another of his tedious sermons in the hope, presumably, that his two-cents’ worth might just tip the scales of public opinion against President Bush