Breaking Away (1979)

A charming Australian coming-of-age tale in which Brenda Blethyn gets to polish up and make more sympathetic her now-familiar screen persona as a loud, vulgar woman of the lower classes

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…

A Chef in Love (or, to give it its French title, Le Mille et Un Recettes d’un Cuisinier Amoureux) by Nana Djordjadze is a Franco-Georgian film which takes the fast-track to success by foreign language films: include lots of food. Set in the Caucasus in 1920, it is the story of a French chef, Pascal…

A strange cinematic fable by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda that might have gone over my head

Is it possible to make a movie about reality TV that’s more cheesy than reality TV? Amazingly enough, it is.

“She was too good for this life. . .” wrote Philip Larkin of the graffiti-covered bathing beauty on the advertising poster for “Sunny Prestatyn” and his ironic pity came to mind as I watched Gillian Anderson piling up the pathos as Lily Bart in Terence Davies’s screen adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of…