Breaking Away (1979)

One True Thing, directed by the excellent Carl Franklin (Devil in the Blue Dress and that Arkansas movie with Billy Bob Thornton) and based on the novel by Anna Quindlen, suffers from trying to do too much. It is really three separate stories that are like plants grown too close together, all fighting for the…

Kenneth Branagh’s new film of Love’s Labour’s Lost has very little to do with the play of the same name by William Shakespeare. Branagh’s marketability (such as it is) has always been pretty closely tied to that of the 16th century playwright, but here he is shamelessly using the Shakespeare brand name simply in order…

An affecting exploration into a social problem which can only be made worse by being regarded as a social problem

Based on real people and real events which took place in 1994, The Straight Story, directed by David Lynch and written by John Roach and Mary Sweeney, is bad in the way that the old Disney movies were bad instead of being bad in the way that the new Disney movies are bad — which…

Waking Ned Devine, written and directed by Kirk Jones, is a delightfully funny and touching film that, I’m afraid, would not win the approval of Bill Bennett. It is about a crime — a fraud perpetrated on the Irish government by an entire Irish village which thus doubtless reveals its collective lack of character and…

The Celebration is a film directed and co-written by Thomas Vinterberg, a Danish director who has teamed up with Lars Von Trier, a fellow Dane, to issue a manifesto called Dogma 95. Everybody, including Mr Vinterberg himself, seems to agree that this is little more than a publicity stunt, and Vinterberg claims that in the…