Brief Encounter

In Ride With the Devil, the great Taiwanese director Ang Lee shows once again that he has a kind of genius for the old Hollywood trick of adapting second-rank fiction to the big screen. This is not meant to be a put-down. First rank fiction very rarely makes a first rank movie. What to my…

The Sixth Day, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, is a movie about cloning that is itself a clone — a genetic duplicate of every other Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle of the last 15 or 20 years. Actually, it is a clone of a clone of a clone, since the Schwarzenegger movie is itself a clone of a…

The latest in this year’s spate of Bush-bashing documentaries goes after Karl Rove

Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life by Michael Paxton turns out to be a product of the Rand industry instead of a critical and dispassionate look at the life of the late novelist and philosopher. For anyone of critical temperament, watching it is only slightly less creepy than sitting through something called L. Ron Hubbard:…

Cradle Will Rock is a huge disappointment—nothing but a vanity project for Tim Robbins, who wrote and directed it. It’s a great shame, not only because Robbins showed that he was capable of something much better in Dead Man Walking a few years ago, but also because it has an all-star cast (including Vanessa Redgrave,…

In spite of all the publicity, Red Corner is rather a roundabout apology for than a criticism of the Red Chinese regime. Richard Gere may be personally hostile to the Chinese gerontocracy, but the movie he wishes to showcase his opposition takes its politics in a depressingly familiar direction which leaves Jiang Zemin and his…