On Moonlight Bay (1951)

It cannot have escaped the notice of my readers that a favorite trope of liberals and other lefties — who more often call themselves “progressives” these days — is that all conservatism is just reflexive resistance to change, and that conservative political proposals are ipso facto designed with the more or less deliberate aim in…

An extended dirty joke — that is, a very funny though obscene movie whose humor is, alas, inseparable from its obscenity

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…

Dr Doolittle, directed by Betty Thomas, stars Eddie Murphy as the eponymous doctor who can talk to the animals. For the nineties, all the whimsy of Hugh Lofting’s literary creation and the earlier film version starring Rex Harrison has given way to post-modern joking as celebrity voices are put into animal mouths and made to…

When the Cat’s Away (not a very adequate translation of the French Chacun Cherche Son Chat or “Everyone’s looking for his cat”), by Cédric Klapisch, is a charmingly old-fashioned kind of film, in spite of its depiction of very contemporary social realities. It offers a marvelously undimmed romanticism about Paris, and about the glamour of…

A charming, amusing but also moving account of the making of Peter Pan