Bullitt (1968)

A Swedish vampire movie comes close to injecting a magical new life into a tired conceit but doesn’t quite succeed

Albert Brooks, more than any other Hollywood writer/director, is able to write satirically about Hollywood without at the same time succumbing to the charm of its own outrageousness. In The Muse he has had the particularly clever idea of casting Sharon Stone, Hollywood’s premiere sex symbol of the moment, as a sexless “Muse” (“All the…

In The Memory of a Killer, also known as The Alzheimer Case (De Zaak Alzheimer), Erik Van Looy has done a nice job of putting together an engaging, high-concept thriller. But once we’ve finished being caught up in it, we can’t help noticing that the high-concept pretty much goes to waste. It is this. A…

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…

Billed as a “psychological thriller,” this movie apparently thinks sticking in not one but two psychos means that anything can happen without being dramatically accounted for

A brilliant and heart-breaking Iranian film that is also a superbly plotted detective story