Big Sleep, The

La Vita è Bella or Life is Beautiful was directed and co-written by Roberto Benigni, who stars as Guido Orefice, a Jewish waiter in Arezzo before the war. He woos and wins his wife, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), whom he calls la principessa — the princess — in memorably comic and romantic style and manages to…

Abbott and Costello bump people off

Not that I approve of it myself, but the metaphor of “culture war” would seem to imply two more or less evenly matched forces struggling with might and main to master and destroy or disperse each other. Yet much of what goes under that name is more like culture murder. Even that expression would be…

When the winner of the Big Game lottery jackpot of $197 million didn’t immediately come forward to claim his prize recently, newspapers were reduced to running an AP photo of the shop in Boston where the winning ticket was sold. In the photo a young man is shown from behind as he affixes a sign…

A beautiful and profound meditation on the claims of a very little, very fragile human life upon eternity

The Spanish title of Only Human by Dominic Harari and Teresa Pelegri is Seres queridos, or “loved ones” and suggests one of those happy-clappy, boosterish Euro-junk films, like Cédric Klapisch’s Auberge Espanole, in which everybody is part of one big happy European family living in a tolerantly multicultural spirit stronger than any differences between them….