Sergeant York

What art can there be in the portrayal of that which we have no business witnessing?

Live Flesh by Pedro Almodovar begins with a scene, set on a lonely night in 1970, in which a baby is born on a bus on the way to the hospital. There is a comic bus driver and a comic older woman helping the baby be born. “If idiots like us didn’t give birth,” she…

Alas for Haiti! Its rulers are crooks and thugs, its religion is voodoo and its heroes are communists

True, it’s not as bad as American Beauty, Sam Mendes’s earlier film, but it’s still quite bad enough.

Time passes and the world moves on, but Hollywood is still making the same basic thriller — in which American government and industry are the bad guys — that it has churned out for 30 years

Hollywood values intelligence and emotional authenticity more than goodness or courage in those it asks us to admire