Amazing Grace

The joke that gives As Good As It Gets its title is the best thing in the picture. Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), a successful novelist, suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder which manifests itself in an insane punctiliousness about rituals, not stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, excessive hand-washing and the like. When his routine is disrupted…

Sensitive writers rendered dysfunctional by their dysfunctional families — hm, where have we heard something like that before?

Regeneration directed by Gillies Mackinnon from a screenplay by Allan Scott and based on the novel by Pat Barker is another retelling of the great left wing myth to come out of the Great War: that it was all the generals’ fault. “Half the seed of Europe,” to use Wilfred Owen’s angry poetic formulation, were…

There is a scene in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair in which the hero, a novelist called Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes), and his married lover, Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore), go to a movie based on one of one of Bendrix’s novels. As they sit in the smoke-filled fleapit, we…

Grey Gardens by David and Albert Maysles is a re-release of the film they made in the 1970s about two women made interesting to the camera by the accident of celebrity, yet whose interest for us is owing simply to their strange and rather pathetic humanity. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter of the same…

A Smile Like Yours, directed by Keith Samples (co-written by Samples and Kevin Meyer), starts off as a kind of throwback to those 1950s comedies in which a lovable ditz of a wife went around getting into trouble which her steady, long-suffering straight-man of a husband would then have to get her out of. George…