Bullitt (1968)

Gekko No Sasayaki or “Moonlight Whispers” is a brilliant little Japanese film, written and directed by Akihiko Shiota, about young love which suddenly spins out of control and becomes sexual perversion. Not a very promising subject, you might think, and the quasi-clinical dimension of the film, though it has a serious point to make, is…

The movies can’t help themselves: they chase the chimera of the “real man” within the great man as great men themselves once chased military glory

"In short measures life may perfect be." — Ben Jonson

Nettoyage à Sec (Dry Cleaning) by Anne Fontaine presents us with a French version of that now familiar Hollywood trope, merely gestured towards in 8mm, the capacity for sexual adventurism and even perversion in all of us. Nicole (Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie (Charles Berling) have been married for 15 years and run a dry-cleaning establishment in…

Me Myself I, written and directed by Pip Karmel, is a sort of Australian version of Sliding Doors but with little of its prototype’s wit or cleverness. Everybody’s favorite bouncing Aussie lass, Rachel Griffiths (who, like Toni Collette, sprang to international stardom out of Muriel’s Wedding) plays a 30-something journalist in Sydney called Pam Drury….

The Beach by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) is obviously le dernier cri in hip, but it is a mess of a movie—sort of Lord of the Flies meets Blue Lagoon. In short, it doesn’t know where it’s going. On the one hand it very much likes the idea of the hippie colony on an almost inaccessible…