On Moonlight Bay (1951)

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…

The Cider House Rules, directed by Lasse Hallström, is the inspiring tale of an abortionist, Dr. Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine), and his long life of tireless, unselfish, devoted service to unwanted children in an orphanage in New England in the early part of the century—when, of course, he was forced to ply his trade illegally….

When J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World had its premiere in Dublin in 1907 there were riots in the streets because the play was thought to be a vicious slander on the Irish people. Synge had seemed to suggest that it was characteristic of the Irish blarney, at least among the rural folk that…

The fairy-tale implications of title of The Princess and the Warrior (or, with German logic, Der Krieger und die Kaiserin), written and directed by Tom Tykwer, is both misleading and not. The film is set in the present day, in Wuppertal, Germany, and is told realistically — without even the fractured time scheme of Tykwer’s…

A visual delight which there are numerous but often mutually contradictory reasons for feeling guilty about enjoying

Varsity Blues, directed by Brian (Good Burger) Robbins, is yet another in the seemingly endless procession of dumb Hollywood movies designed to attack the masculine virtues and what used to be thought of as the laudable American quality of the will to win. Like Affliction and The Thin Red Line in recent weeks, it seems to…