Raiders of the Lost Ark

An occasionally amusing parable of guilt and forgiveness whose setting in small-town America, like the prejudices of its author, does it no favors

The three Australian Twentyman brothers are such lovable criminals that we’re even supposed to love their criminality. In short, they’re just like American movie criminals.

Buddy by Caroline Thompson is the (more or less) true story of Gertrude Lintz (Rene Russo), a Brooklyn socialite of the 1920s and 30s and author of Animals Are My Hobby, who raised chimpanzees as if they were children with some interesting results and later tried the same trick with a gorilla (the eponymous Buddy,…

The key line in Mike Nichols’s adaptation of Joe Klein’s Primary Colors comes as Governor Jack Stanton (John Travolta), hot on the trail of the presidency after having just disposed of his last rival for the Democratic nomination, tries to persuade his idealistic young aide, Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), to stay with the campaign. Henry…

Pushing Tin, directed by Mike Newell, is a reminder that our popular culture wants it both ways. On the one hand it thrives, as entertainment has always done, on the competition of macho men to see who is stronger, smarter, quicker or more dexterous. On the other hand it feels constrained to deplore such competition…

The Blair Witch Project directed by the first-time filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and David Myrick, is a curious and partly successful attempt to make fiction look as much like documentary as possible by giving us what purports to be raw documentary footage from three young kids who were making a film about witches in the mountains…