Badlands (1973)

A handsome reproduction of 1970s-era Britain but with a distinctly contemporary revulsion against Cold War style espionage and its practitioners

Volker Schlöndorff’s film, The Legend of Rita has many virtues, not the least of them being a wonderfully watchable leading lady in Bibiana Beglau. She is a sort of Communist version of Betjeman’s wonderful tennis girls of suburban England: beautiful, strong-limbed, confident and somehow both terrifying and lovable at the same time. She plays the…

Another cinematic exercise in drinking deep from the intoxicating stream of popular paranoia

Event Horizon written by Philip Eisner and directed by Paul Anderson, is set in 2047 and stars Laurence Fishburne as Miller, the captain of a rescue space ship called USAC Lewis and Clark which is going to see what happened to another ship, the Event Horizon, that got lost on a trip to the stars…

An interesting and authentic-looking account of men in combat in Afghanistan but one with a depressingly familiar anti-war subtext

A liberal gets alarmed at the state of our education system and the education establishment that runs it so badly — but not too alarmed