Letters from Iwo Jima

Part romance, part lurid soap opera and part picture postcard of old Japan, this film slips just enough of the real thing past its inevitable Hollywoodification to make it worth seeing

Celebrity is the first good film Woody Allen has made since Husbands and Wives, though it’s still not all that great. It is about celebrity, which is a subject of major concern to the postmodernist sensibility, and it makes use of a central postmodern joke. That is, the celebrity director known as “Woody Allen,” does…

A Chef in Love (or, to give it its French title, Le Mille et Un Recettes d’un Cuisinier Amoureux) by Nana Djordjadze is a Franco-Georgian film which takes the fast-track to success by foreign language films: include lots of food. Set in the Caucasus in 1920, it is the story of a French chef, Pascal…

Children of the Revolution, written and directed by Peter Duncan, represents the less attractive side of the Australian sensibility I have so often had occasion to praise here. For it is a too-natural development out of healthy skepticism to turn merely cynical, and that is what, I take it, we have here. There is, to…

That icky little left-wing prole, Robert Altman, amuses himself by satirizing his social betters. Does that make you feel better about yourself?

A life-long master of publicity hits the jackpot one more time.