Breaking Away (1979)

Remarkably, a movie as stuck on The New York Times as The New York Times is

Fairy Tale by Charles Sturridge tells the story—sort of—of the fairy-photograph hoax perpetrated by a couple of young girls in Yorkshire in 1917-18. Now if you are going to do this on film, this way of doing it, with a bunch of ostensibly real fairies buzzing about on dragonfly wings, is probably the best way…

The Saint, starring Val Kilmer and Elizabeth Shue and directed by Phillip Noyce is simply one more Hollywood wish-fulfilment fantasy for teenage boys — full of gadgetry, secret identities, revenge against authority and beautiful but compliant females — and therefore of negligible interest to those with a more general interest in the art of cinema….

A Merry War is the American title given to the adaptation by Robert Bierman (director) and Alan Plater (writer) of George Orwell’s sunniest novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying— presumably because Americans don’t know what an aspidistra is. For the record, it is a houseplant with long, leathery swordlike leaves which, in the 1930s was a…

An over-long mess of a film that tries to do way too much but is always enjoyable to watch

George of the Jungle, directed by Sam Weisman and written by Dana Olsen and Audrey Wells is Disney’s concession to children who found Hercules too sophisticated. I would have guessed that anyone over the age of nine who so much as cracks a smile at all this strenuous but vain effort to be funny must…