Letters from Iwo Jima

A period piece from the great days of the nouvelle vague and imitation French noir. You should get a kick out of it.

It’s nice to know, as I’m sure I’ve said before, that somewhere in the world life on celluloid is still an earnest business and not a sly, postmodern in-joke as it has so largely become in the pampered West. You might have to go to China, however, still not recovered from nearly 50 years of…

La Vita è Bella or Life is Beautiful was directed and co-written by Roberto Benigni, who stars as Guido Orefice, a Jewish waiter in Arezzo before the war. He woos and wins his wife, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), whom he calls la principessa — the princess — in memorably comic and romantic style and manages to…

Wild, Wild West, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, is one of those movies where you can reconstruct the story conference. “It’s James Bond in the Old West,” says the pitchman. “Only he’s black, you see. Will Smith would be perfect for the part. He can be a dandy, Maverick-like, and of course a ladies’ man. But…

David Cronenberg’s is the second of this week’s meditations on “violence” and, though better than Dear Wendy, is still pretty confused

The Thomas Crown Affair, a remake by John McTiernan of the classic of 1968 which starred Steve McQueen, is what I like to call a designer movie. True, it is also a cleverly conceived heist caper whose interesting premiss is that a rich man, the eponymous Mr. Crown (Pierce Brosnan), in search of excitement will…