On Moonlight Bay (1951)

Formerly, the American dream was being able to buy a house in the suburbs with a picket fence; now, perhaps, it is being able to live in a frat house like a college boy until retirement

Dancing at Lughnasa, written by Frank McGuinness from play by Brian Friel and directed by Pat O’Connor, stars Marvelous Meryl Streep doing a vowel-perfect Irish accent as Kate Mundy, a severe old maid and schoolmistress who is trying to hold together her little family in Ireland in the 1930s. The family consists of her four…

Time passes and the world moves on, but Hollywood is still making the same basic thriller — in which American government and industry are the bad guys — that it has churned out for 30 years

Beautiful people having funny adventures on the wrong side of the law and getting rich. You’ve just got to love them —  don’t you?

Poor Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard! The only fugitives he ever gets to chase are Houdini-like in their ability to wriggle out of certain capture and who thus put him through a hell of frustration over and over (and over and over) again. . .and then they turn out to be innocent! Oops! Hope I didn’t…

The best thing about Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, written and directed by the Englishman, Guy Ritchie, is the plot. Long before Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction revolutionized the noir style of thriller and brought back the gangster movie in a new form, a tightly constructed, intricate plot was one of the…