Affair to Remember, An

Re-make fever strikes again, and with even more lamentable results than usual. Will someone please stop Kenneth Branagh before he directs again?

The first question to be asked about the shot-by-shot remake of Psycho, directed from Alfred Hitchcock’s original shooting script by Gus Van Sant, is why? What is the point? Couldn’t they just have got Ted Turner to “colorize” the great man’s greatest masterpiece? Why bother to hire a whole new cast and crew to go…

Well, they got the loathing part right anyway. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, directed by Terry Gilliam, is very nearly as unwatchable as the book by Hunter S. Thompson on which it is based is unreadable. In spite of the presence of Johnny Depp, for whose talent I have considerable respect, in the Raul…

This film by Peter Hedges tries hard to be both charming and uplifting but doesn’t quite succeed in being either

Smilla’s Sense of Snow, based on the novel by Peter Hoeg and directed by Bille August from a screenplay by Ann Biderman, is another film in which far too much is going on. At its most basic, it is about the search by the beautiful young Smilla (Julia Ormond) for the murderer of a six…

Well, here goes. The following, I know, is an invitation to hate-mail, but I have to say that Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, written and directed by George Lucas, demonstrates a remarkable paucity of imagination. The thought first came to me in the scene where Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) explains to Queen Amidala…