Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

Ridley Scott has produced a masterpiece about men in battle. As you might expect, The New York Times hated it.

Ready to Rumble, directed by Brian Robbins and written by Steven Brill, might have been called “Dumb and Dumber Go to the Mat.” Its ostensible look behind the scenes at professional wrestling could have followed the trail blazed by the excellent Beyond the Mat, reviewed here last month. Instead the movie settles for repeated attempts…

A good-hearted Australian movie that just about rises to the level of being worth watching

We might call Metro by Tom Carter a palimpsest movie—one where you can read another text beneath the one on the surface. To some extent this is true of all Hollywood movies, which are made (as they nearly always have been made) with a cavalier disregard for the writer’s craft. At some point in the…

Aiming for the Like Water for Chocolate niche in the market, Woman on Top is advertised as a movie about sex and cooking — which at least must be said to beat sex and shopping. Insofar as it is actually about anything, however, it is more about magic. And not very interesting magic. The magic,…

The gay fantasy of sex divorced from sin is superimposed on a community of Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles