Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

Bad jokes are like rotten apples: it only takes a few of them to spoil the whole barrel. Company Man, a co-written, co-directed effort by Douglas McGrath and Peter Askin, starts off very promisingly. Its jokes are crisp and tart and juicy. But not long into it we take our first bite of the rotten…

A slight but charming Indian take on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

The 24 Hour Woman by Nancy Savoca stars Rosie Perez as Grace, the producer of a local daytime show TV show in New York called “The 24 Hour Woman.” The movie begins with Grace’s discovery that she is pregnant. Grace, her husband, Eddie (Diego Serrano), one of the on-air stars of the show and their…

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…

Albert Brooks, more than any other Hollywood writer/director, is able to write satirically about Hollywood without at the same time succumbing to the charm of its own outrageousness. In The Muse he has had the particularly clever idea of casting Sharon Stone, Hollywood’s premiere sex symbol of the moment, as a sexless “Muse” (“All the…

That Carlos Reygadas, boy genius, keeps his plot mostly out of sight suggests that he is embarrassed by it — and rightly so