It Happened One Night

Like David Lynch in The Straight Story, Mike Leigh apparently thought it was time to surprise us with Topsy-Turvy. Instead of his usual dark and sardonic and implicitly political look at present- day Britain, he offers us an ostensibly sunny period-piece about, of all things, the collaboration of W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and Sir Arthur…

Chasing Amy is another slacker movie and thus another piece of redundant evidence that America has become far richer than is good for it. Boys the age of this film’s director, Kevin Smith, whose earlier efforts are Clerks and Mall Rats, ought to be doing their army basic training, or serving as apprentices at some…

Guess what? Shakespeare is once again “our contemporary.” Yet how much more interesting he is when he is allowed to be out of date.

Event Horizon written by Philip Eisner and directed by Paul Anderson, is set in 2047 and stars Laurence Fishburne as Miller, the captain of a rescue space ship called USAC Lewis and Clark which is going to see what happened to another ship, the Event Horizon, that got lost on a trip to the stars…

Paul Thomas Anderson shows why style, however brilliant, cannot make up for basic flaws in content.

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…