High Noon

Kiss or Kill was written and directed by Bill Bennett — no, not that Bill Bennett but yet another example of the astonishing outpouring of Australian cinematic talent of the past few years. It takes as the basis of its dramatic scenario a theme that most Americans would have thought was not only thoroughly worn…

Every few years around Christmas time, Steven Spielberg feels the need to trot out his social conscience for public examination. Four years ago it was Schindler’s List, a film designed to show how bad the Holocaust was. This year it is Amistad—the story of a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish ship in 1839 which created…

James Cameron”s latest record-breaker is a triumph of the new, video-game arts but a grievous defeat for the Western mimetic tradition

I can’t say much about Evita by Alan Parker, based on the stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, because I just don’t like the music very much. I admit that Mr Lloyd Webber has written some swell tunes in Cats and Phantom of the Opera, but most of his music seems to…

Maybe Ali McGraw couldn’t have managed it, but one would have liked to see the beautiful and talented Leelee Sobieski given a chance to move an audience without having to die. Alas, it was not to be. Here On Earth, written by Michael Seitzman and directed by Mark Piznarski, is a remake of Love Story…

Every so often a reader writes asking me to lighten up, to stop looking so closely at the movies I review and just relax and enjoy them. I always wonder why people would bother reading a critic who did that. Could they not relax and enjoy a movie themselves unless they could reassure themselves that…