Fistful of Dollars

The General’s Daughter, directed by Simon West from a screenplay by Christopher Bertolini and William Goldman, adapted from the novel by Nelson DeMille is yet another example of Hollywood’s grotesquely misconceived representation of life in our country’s armed forces where, we are constantly asked to believe, kinky sex vies with political plots and murder as…

Star Trek: Insurrection, directed by Jonathan Frakes, is another black- box movie — which is to say a movie that elevates the deus ex machina into a guiding principle. I know that I risk offending a lot of Trekkies who are used to this kind of thing, but I find it merely boring. Every time…

Detroit Rock City, written by Carl V. Dupré and directed by Adam Rifkin, is a loathsome movie about which I have nothing more to say than to marvel that anything like it could be made today. There is a lot that is wrong about the movies of our own time, but to give them their…

You’ve got to wonder about the chutzpah — or the stupidity — of a director who would invite comparisons between his movie and what is arguably the greatest work of dramatic art ever penned, Shakespeare’s King Lear. But the Danish director, Kristian Levring, has done it, and on the whole we can be glad that…

City of Angels by Brad Silberling is a remake of Wim Wenders’s The Wings of Desire which takes many of Wenders’s best ideas and puts them in the service of a standard issue, Hollywood chick flick—a Wallis Simpson fantasy about some big shot guy who gives up everything for a gal. And what a lot…

A fast-moving thriller that is all slick surface and superheroic action with nothing much else to recommend it, apart from its apology for torture