On Moonlight Bay (1951)

Next Stop, Wonderland, written and directed by Brad Anderson, is a charming romantic comedy with a great many funny moments, though it doesn’t quite pull everything together in its rather unsatisfactory ending. But it has an excellent beginning. Erin (Hope Davis) comes home one day to find her live-in boyfriend, Sean (Phil Hoffman), moving out…

A delightful return to the — amusingly tweaked — conventions of silent film for an unexpectedly moving if familiar love story

Nurse Betty, the new film by Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors), is wonderfully enjoyable all the way through until its last ten minutes when suddenly the wild and thrilling ride it has offered us comes to a dead end. The story concerns Betty (Renée Zellweger), a small-town waitress from…

A great film and a heartening demonstration that romance on the grand scale, as Hollywood used to do it, is still possible

Arguing the World, a documentary directed by Joseph Dorman, is what a documentary should be. That is, it persuasively re-creates a historical milieu—in this case intellectual life in post-War New York—by telling a particular story. The story is that of City College in the 1930s and 1940s, known as “the Jewish Harvard,” where the sons…

All by itself, X-men seems to have turned around Hollywood’s summer, earning $57.5 million in its opening weekend (more than any other July film, ever) and making a lacklustre box office into something not far short of boffo. As to an adult sensibility (but who has one of those anymore?) this techno-fantasy may look all…