Annie Hall

If, as I believe, the new media aristocracy is essentially the aristocracy of feeling, then Johnny Depp is the crown prince. Was ever a face more perfectly constructed to express our turn-of-the-century ideal of a fine vulnerability, a noble sensitivity to every emotional breeze that ripples its surface? Unfortunately, with looks like his there are…

Another slick product of the contemporary movie business’s propaganda arm

Just imagine what you would get if the director of Trainspotting turned his hand to romantic comedy and, sure enough, that’s pretty much what you get with Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary. As with Trainspotting and their earlier hit, Shallow Grave, Boyle is joined by Andrew Macdonald (producer) and John Hodge (writer), but by…

Your Friends and Neighbors by Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men) is must-see cinema, though you will come away from it depressed and angry. In the midst of our frivolous, postmodern era, LaBute has, at least in this film, a true modernist edge to him. Like Beckett or Pinter he presents us with a…

Like the unsuccessfully arty Deceiver, the unashamedly popular Desperate Measures by Barbet Schroeder is a film which begins by telling us the IQ—“over 150”—of its criminal protagonist, Peter McCabe (Michael Keaton). Oh dear. Once again we are in the presence of one of those criminal geniuses who are so seldom to be met with in…

. . . And now Lewis Schwarzberg raises the question: does being a patriot require you to be a sentimentalist as well?