Breaking Away (1979)

There’s no question that Shine director Scott Hicks’s Snow Falling on Cedars is well-named. The weather — not only snow but fog and rain and looming clouds over the glorious landscapes of San Pedro Island in coastal Washington state — is undoubtedly the star of the show. Unfortunately, this is because the weather is mainly…

Maybe I’m growing tired and jaded from seeing large numbers of mediocre movies, but more and more I find that the best I can say of a romantic comedy is that it’s not so bad as I expected it to be. This is certainly true of Someone Like You, primary responsibility for which belongs to…

An often-moving fictional account of a real event in World War I suffers from the same fault it criticizes in those who led their countries into war

Movies about novelists can be even more deadly boring and narcissistic than novels about novelists. Wonder Boys, directed by Curtis Hanson from an adaptation by Steve Kloves of Michael Chabon’s novel, is a case in point. Not only is the movie far too taken up with writers and writerliness, it is a movie made according…

The Eel, directed by Shohei Imamura, is like so many Japanese films a visual feast which works less well as a naturalistic drama than as a sort of moral parable, shot through with significant symbolism in mostly beautiful pictures. The story is of a midlevel Japanese “salaryman” called Yamashita (Koji Yakusho, who made such an…

Earlier this year, in a review of Panic by Henry Bromell, I observed that it was possible to appreciate a film which is an impressive bit of propaganda for a political position with which you profoundly disagree. Just think of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will. Nowadays, the most assiduous ideologues among film-makers are…