Springfield Rifle

Another cinematic exercise in drinking deep from the intoxicating stream of popular paranoia

The best movie I have seen so far this year is Open Hearts, a Dogme 95 film directed by Susanne Bier from a script she co-wrote with the great Anders Thomas Jensen, who also co-wrote Mifune and The King is Alive, two other Dogme productions that are among the best films of recent years. The…

Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump is one of those precious, self- conscious films that tries so hard to be heart-warming that it ultimately gives you heartburn. Candide, or perhaps Huckleberry Finn, meets Woody Allen’s Zelig in the title character, and it makes for a disconcerting mix. But this is not really a satire, as you might…

At its best, Olivier Assayas’s film, Irma Vep (an anagram of Vampire) is rather difficult for an American audience, unfamiliar with the classic French silent film Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade (1915), to understand, since so much of it depends on playing off that kind of innocence, but the appallingly poor English pronunciation of Jean…

Sling Blade by Billy Bob Thornton deserves credit for the acting job of its director and writer, who also plays the principal role, that of Karl Childers, a mentally retarded man in his 30s released from a state institution — the state seems to be Arkansas — after serving twenty years for murdering his mother…

A romantic murder mystery out of Argentina that has a lot to recommend it