Letters from Iwo Jima

John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes makes the typical mistake of movies that attempt to satirize the celebrity-obsessed media culture of which, inevitably, they themselves are a part. In fact, so reliably do movies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers or Costa Gavras’s Mad City get it wrong that the suspicious-minded might be tempted to think that…

Margarethe von Trotta’s moving story of a few brave German women who successfully defied the Nazis after their husbands were arrested gets a bit lost in the complications of the telling

A great fan of Taste of Cherry, the last film by the Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, I went to his newest, The Wind Will Carry Us with high hopes. I was not disappointed. It is an even better, more engaging and interesting, work than the other, but is recognizably by the same man. In particular,…

Brother, a Russian film written and directed by Alexei Balabanov, stars Sergei Bodrov, Jr, as Danila, a recently discharged soldier at a loose end who makes his way to St. Petersburg where his brother, Viktor (Victor Suhorukov) is somebody in the burgeoning underworld of Russia’s second city. The city itself is a main character in…

Another brilliantly funny episode in the lives of a cheese-eating inventor and his dog

Magnolia, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, is like David O. Russell’s Three Kings in being an impressive display of moviemaking talent without ever quite becoming an impressive movie. In both cases, I think, the problem is that the talented writer-directors are overreaching themselves and trying to do too much. In the case of…