Annie Hall

Earlier this year, in a review of Panic by Henry Bromell, I observed that it was possible to appreciate a film which is an impressive bit of propaganda for a political position with which you profoundly disagree. Just think of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will. Nowadays, the most assiduous ideologues among film-makers are…

An epic tale of an outcast Vietnamese boy’s quest to find his American father

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…

At its best, Olivier Assayas’s film, Irma Vep (an anagram of Vampire) is rather difficult for an American audience, unfamiliar with the classic French silent film Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade (1915), to understand, since so much of it depends on playing off that kind of innocence, but the appallingly poor English pronunciation of Jean…

Britain may be the only country in the world where it is still possible to make movies which glorify and romanticize and sentimentalize an old-fashioned view of masculinity—and have it come off looking progressive. Last spring we had Brassed Off which traded off its romantic notions of a stag-line of Yorkshire coal-miners down t’pit or…

Almost a pastiche of a Truffaut-like coming of age picture, but without Truffaut’s magic touch