On Moonlight Bay (1951)

Jackie Brown confirms two things we have always really known about Quentin Tarantino at his best (at his worst he is just unspeakable). One is that he is the most compulsively watchable filmmaker now working in America. He knows how to keep an audience riveted to the screen, and he knows how to tell a…

Magnolia, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, is like David O. Russell’s Three Kings in being an impressive display of moviemaking talent without ever quite becoming an impressive movie. In both cases, I think, the problem is that the talented writer-directors are overreaching themselves and trying to do too much. In the case of…

A lovely film about an American con-man and one of his dupes who find a spooky kind of redemption in each other

Like so much of the rest of Neil LaBute’s output, this is a good movie in a bad — I think a very bad — cause.

Yet another illustration of Hollywood’s failure to learn the lesson that less is more — particularly when it comes to spooky mysteries

A coming of age story set in an immigrant subculture that’s worth seeing mainly for the acting