Sands of Iwo Jima, The

Three Kings, written and directed by David O. Russell begins with a quasi- documentary moment. We see, off in the distance, a soldier with a weapon in his hand waving it aloft — we cannot tell whether it is as a gesture of surrender or threat — as Sgt Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) in full…

M:I-2, directed by John Woo and written by Robert Towne, is like the original Mission Impossible (1996) in being a postmodern-style romance of technology. The earlier film, which was directed by Brian de Palma, did for the deus ex machina what Shakespeare did for the Aristotelian unities, which is to say that it blew the…

A proud vulgarization of Fitzgerald’s novel by Baz Luhrmann

A ridiculous bit of wish-fulfilment nevertheless suggests that family values may no longer be considered box-office poison.

Unmade Beds by Nicholas Barker is the sort of picture I would normally hate: a kind of heightened documentary that is not really, as it purports to be, straightforward interviews with four single adults in New York but rather staged interviews in which each of the subjects has been given a chance to work up…

Waking Ned Devine, written and directed by Kirk Jones, is a delightfully funny and touching film that, I’m afraid, would not win the approval of Bill Bennett. It is about a crime — a fraud perpetrated on the Irish government by an entire Irish village which thus doubtless reveals its collective lack of character and…