Bullitt (1968)

An exciting and well-made movie about American soldiers at war in Iraq which doesn’t condescend to them — but which also doesn’t treat them as being quite real

Citizen Ruth by Alexander Payne is not so good a movie as it ought to be, given its materials and the good idea of its conception (you should pardon the term). Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern) is a feckless dopehead living on the margins of lower middle class Omaha. The film begins with a scene of…

A beautifully made film about how we acquire and shed identities in an individualistic culture that offers too many choices

Costa-Gavras — with the help of Rolf Hochhuth — delivers a stinging indictment of the Catholic church’s part in the Holocaust. You were expecting, maybe, exoneration?

Un Air de Famille, directed by Cédric Klapisch (While the Cat’s Away) from an original play by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, is enormous fun, and I highly recommend it if you are lucky enough to find it opening in your neighborhood. Denis (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is having affair with Betty (Miss Jaoui) while working for…

In The Theory of Flight, Helena Bonham Carter may have contracted Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, better known to Americans as Lou Gehrig’s disease, but her real-life beau, Kenneth Branagh, seems to have contracted an even worse case of Robin Williams’s disease. Both KB and RW are young men who labor under the burden of more blessings…