Double Indemnity

[See discussion under “My diary” entry for June 29, 2011] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Derivative and way too heavily overstocked with morals, themes, narrative false starts and pathos, this movie is nevertheless not without its entertaining qualities

Hotel de Love by Craig Rosenberg is, like Cosi, a fresh and amusing Australian film that puts Hollywood schlock like Fools Rush In to shame. It tells the story of twin brothers, Rick (Aden Young, who also plays Nick in Cosi) and Stephen (Simon Bossell) who fall in love with the same girl, Melissa (Saffron…

Deconstructing Harry by Woody Allen is like every other Woody Allen movie: a succession of more or less good jokes bound together by an essentially puerile fantasy. Or, in this case, a succession of interlocking fantasies. Harry Block (Mr Allen) is a novelist who is forever mining his chaotic private life for material for his…

Hurlyburly directed by Anthony Drazan and written (from his stageplay) by David Rabe has an all-star cast, but it cannot escape from the poverty of its script, in which nothing very much happens (people come and go) and all the characters talk exactly alike—that is in a kind of souped-up psychobabble with an occasionally Pinterian…

The Spanish Prisoner, written and directed by David Mamet, gives expression to a refined kind of paranoia born of what we might call sophistication-anxiety. This results in the common assumption among contemporary writers, artists and (especially) filmmakers — see, for example, the recent movies Wild Things and L.A. Confidential — that everything must be different…