Letters from Iwo Jima

A real train-wreck of a movie from which, nevertheless, we may learn something

Like The Damned United, this is another British film which derives its oomph from a (mostly) successful attempt to recapture the way things were decades ago — and persuading us that it matters

The three Australian Twentyman brothers are such lovable criminals that we’re even supposed to love their criminality. In short, they’re just like American movie criminals.

Shooting Fish by Stefan Schwartz stars Dan Futterman and Stuart Townsend as Dylan and Jez (short for Jeremiah), an American and an Englishman who team up to run various scams in the interests, they say, of some orphans, namely themselves. If this strikes you as a jolly jape, you may be as much stuck in…

The re-release of Jules Dassin’s Rififi (French title: Du Rififi Chez les Hommes) of 1954 comes opportunely to remind the Hollywood epigoni known to these pages as the Taranteenies of what film noir really was. The chief difference between it and that which too often, and too erroneously, goes under the same name today, is…

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…