On Moonlight Bay (1951)

Here is the story of Message in a Bottle, directed by Luis Madoki. A desperately sad widower and boat-builder, the strikingly handsome Garret Blake (Kevin Costner), puts letters to his dead wife in bottles and throws the bottles into the sea. They are found by a beautiful young, unattached single mother called Theresa (Robin Wright…

Love and Death on Long Island, directed by Richard Kwietniowski from a novel by Gilbert Adair, is not really about death. Its title puns on the name of its principal character, played by John Hurt, who is called Giles De’Ath. But it might as well have been called De’Ath in Venice, since it is all…

“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…

Down to Earth, Chris Rock’s remake (directed by Chris and Paul Weitz) of Heaven Can Wait (1978)—itself a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)—is a disappointment. Though there are some very funny things in it, its glib message about being oneself turns out to be a cover for being self-indulgent, in the style (I’m…

Here is the story of Message in a Bottle, directed by Luis Madoki. A desperately sad widower and boat-builder, the strikingly handsome Garret Blake (Kevin Costner), puts letters to his dead wife in bottles and throws the bottles into the sea. They are found by a beautiful young, unattached single mother called Theresa (Robin Wright…

Love and Death on Long Island, directed by Richard Kwietniowski from a novel by Gilbert Adair, is not really about death. Its title puns on the name of its principal character, played by John Hurt, who is called Giles De’Ath. But it might as well have been called De’Ath in Venice, since it is all…

“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…

Down to Earth, Chris Rock’s remake (directed by Chris and Paul Weitz) of Heaven Can Wait (1978)—itself a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)—is a disappointment. Though there are some very funny things in it, its glib message about being oneself turns out to be a cover for being self-indulgent, in the style (I’m…

A dark, European take on the classic Hollywood version of the myth of the American frontier, but set in contemporary Denmark