Public Enemy, The

The latest news from the plaintiff’s bar: Morgan Spurlock may have found a way for fatties to get their pudgy hands on McDonalds’ billions

Beshkempir: The Adopted Son by Aktan Abdykalykov from Kyrgyzstan is written in Kyrgyzstani and stars the director’s son (Mirlan Abdykalykov) as Beshkempir, a name which literally means “five grandmothers.” It is a name sometimes given to adopted children to signify the role played by a sort of council of old women of the village in…

Alice et Martin, directed and co-written by André Techiné, is an unconventional romance of a type that the French are so good at, but it is also a complex psychological drama which, I think, loses itself in its own complexities. At the level of the cinematic or dramatic detail it is a fine film. The…

La Vita è Bella or Life is Beautiful was directed and co-written by Roberto Benigni, who stars as Guido Orefice, a Jewish waiter in Arezzo before the war. He woos and wins his wife, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), whom he calls la principessa — the princess — in memorably comic and romantic style and manages to…

A harrowing account of the brutal Japanese occupation of the Chinese capital in 1937, of which few are left alive to tell the tale

Detroit Rock City, written by Carl V. Dupré and directed by Adam Rifkin, is a loathsome movie about which I have nothing more to say than to marvel that anything like it could be made today. There is a lot that is wrong about the movies of our own time, but to give them their…