On Moonlight Bay (1951)

Every so often a reader writes asking me to lighten up, to stop looking so closely at the movies I review and just relax and enjoy them. I always wonder why people would bother reading a critic who did that. Could they not relax and enjoy a movie themselves unless they could reassure themselves that…

Double Jeopardy, directed by Bruce Beresford, is the latest example of what is coming to be one of Hollywood’s favorite new genres: the female paranoia movie. Like The Astronaut’s Wife of a few weeks ago, it deliberately sets out to exploit the sort of insecurity that has become endemic, in some ways the most destructive…

Sensitive young men who feel betrayed by their heroic but unfeeling fathers (and mothers) have so been done to death, yet we never seem to tire of them

At the climax of Frequency, directed by Gregory Hoblit from a script by Toby Emmerich., we see both Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid) and his grown son, Johnny, a.k.a. the Chief (Jim Caviezel), fighting with the same man (Shawn Doyle), the sort of policeman-cum-serial killer of a sort that only seems to exist in the movies….

Beautiful People, written and directed by Jasmin Dizdar, is what we might call a Rodney King movie—a relatively harmless, feel-good concoction of a familiar kind which asks, rhetorically, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Of course, neither Jasmin Dizdar nor Rodney King is interested in any answer there may be to their question. Instead,…

The Franco-German director Dominik Moll’s new film is called Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Veut du Bien, which means, “Harry, a friend who only wants the best for you.” For its American release it has been given the slightly misleading English title of With A Friend Like Harry. . ., but in other English-speaking countries…