Double Indemnity

A Norwegian film whose amusing qualities are the spoonful of sugar that helps the message-medicine go down

When the winner of the Big Game lottery jackpot of $197 million didn’t immediately come forward to claim his prize recently, newspapers were reduced to running an AP photo of the shop in Boston where the winning ticket was sold. In the photo a young man is shown from behind as he affixes a sign…

When The Very Thought of You, directed by Nick Hamm from a screenplay by Peter Morgan, was released in Britain last year, it was called Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence. The American distributors must have thought that sounded somehow too suggestive, so they gave it one of those nondescript American titles, like Lost and…

[See “Entry from August 25, 2007” under “My Diary”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Volker Schlöndorff’s film, The Legend of Rita has many virtues, not the least of them being a wonderfully watchable leading lady in Bibiana Beglau. She is a sort of Communist version of Betjeman’s wonderful tennis girls of suburban England: beautiful, strong-limbed, confident and somehow both terrifying and lovable at the same time. She plays the…

A clever but possibly inadvertent satire on the way we live, romantically, now