Breaking Away (1979)

Dr Doolittle, directed by Betty Thomas, stars Eddie Murphy as the eponymous doctor who can talk to the animals. For the nineties, all the whimsy of Hugh Lofting’s literary creation and the earlier film version starring Rex Harrison has given way to post-modern joking as celebrity voices are put into animal mouths and made to…

Pity poor Pat Tillman, fated to be a posthumous propaganda tool for one side or the other in our increasingly graceless public dialogue on matters of war and peace

Panic, written and directed by Henry Bromell, does a fine job of setting up the classic therapeutic paradigm so beloved of the theorists of what they call “patriarchy.” This it does, I take it, for political reasons, since the very existence of “patriarchy” depends on an explicitly political assumption, namely that there is some realizable…

Brian De Palma is a talented director, but he really needs to get himself some better writers. Mission to Mars is full of clever ideas, which are too rare in the movies, and spectacular, computer-generated special effects, which are not nearly rare enough, but much of the dialogue is cornball stuff that could have come…

In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai is a beautiful film. In fact, it is a film that the word “beautiful,” as applied to the movies, could have been invented to describe. It helps, of course, that the two principal players are Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, both extraordinarily good-looking people, and that the…