Springfield Rifle

David Mamet’s State and Main is so slow moving, so sluggishly edited, that you’ve got to wonder if it is so through incompetence — though this might be OK for other kinds of films, it’s disastrous in a comedy — or if there is some subtle purpose to it: an attempt to assert, for example,…

The fantastical superhero makes the transition from childish wish-fulfilment to adult castration nightmare. Is this progress?

The English version of the title of Amores Perros, written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is given by its distributors as Love is a Bitch, though this seems to be something of an unhappy compromise, suggesting one of those assembly-line romantic comedies cranked out by Hollywood to exploit the fame of…

A gripping and well-made Italian film that never quite gets around to answering the biggest of the questions it raises

The absurdly pretentious and over-ambitious winner of this year’s Cannes Festival is at least pretty to look at

Early on in Keeping the Faith, Father Brian Finn (Edward Norton) advises his worshiping flock, most of whom appear to be worshiping him, that “faith is different from religion,” and he makes it clear which of the two he prefers. Religion is old, stuffy, rule-bound, while faith is personal—“a feeling, a hunch,” he says. I’m…