Badlands (1973)

Zoe goes from being a party girl that the guys don’t call next day to one of the feminist legends of the West. And she owes it all to her electronic tether.

To the question of why anyone would want to rewrite King Lear so as to make Goneril and Regan the heroines and poor old Lear and (to a lesser extent) Cordelia the villains, there can only be one answer: in order to make a revolutionary statement. Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, now translated to the…

Saving Grace, written by Craig Ferguson and Mark Crowdy and directed by Nigel Cole, I found a surprisingly charming and thoroughly entertaining film until about three quarters of the way through, when it lapsed into a tired druggy fantasy that made the rest of the thing look bad retrospectively. I think the key to making…

Swept from the Sea by Beeban Kidron is a ludicrously overblown adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s short story, “Amy Foster.” Now the first and absolutely essential thing for you to know about Conrad’s Amy is that she was — how shall we say? — of the canine kind with regard to feminine pulchritude. Also stupid. Conrad…

If you don’t already know what the thugs and murderers of the Afghan Taliban régime were like, this is the movie for you

It’s time that the team of computer programmers from IBM who developed “Deep Blue,” the machine that beat the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, to take on a real challenge. Let them try to develop a movie-making program that is more formidable — or more machine-like — than Steven Spielberg. His latest directorial effort, Saving…