When Harry Met Sally

The title is a lie. The only temptation fought with in this movie is the temptation to be pious and virtuous.

My Giant directed by Michael Lehmann is yet another depressingly heart-warming tale from Billy Crystal, who is second in the heart-warming league only to his friend and co-star in the relentlessly heartwarming Father’s Day, Robin Williams. Someone once said that all comedy is cruel, but Billy Crystal is living proof that this is not true….

Play It To the Bone, directed by Ron Shelton, is a Woody Harrelson movie in every sense of the term — that is it is full of macho posturing at the same time that it attempts to make a joke (a rather tired joke by now, you might think) about male stupidity. This is how…

The Way of the Gun, a movie written and directed for critics by Christopher McQuarrie — who won an Oscar for the screenplay of that other critics’ movie, The Usual Suspects — begins and ends with a voiceover narration by one of the two stars, Ryan Phillippe, purporting to debunk the idea of a natural…

Live Flesh by Pedro Almodovar begins with a scene, set on a lonely night in 1970, in which a baby is born on a bus on the way to the hospital. There is a comic bus driver and a comic older woman helping the baby be born. “If idiots like us didn’t give birth,” she…

You know you’re in trouble with a movie that begins as the camera pans over the spines of a pile of highbrow books. Look at all those impressive authors’ names! Kierkegaard, Chekhov, Joyce, the Marquis de Sade. The selection is as telling (and is meant to be) as the books themselves about what it is…