Double Indemnity

Like its predecessor, Toy Story 2 is a triumph of technology — the relatively new technology of computer animation — if not of moviemaking. In fact, as a kind of technological marvel it is naturally impervious to criticism on any merely airy-fairy, aesthetic grounds. Like the Bond films with which it might otherwise be thought…

Enemy at the Gates, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, aspires to the Saving Private Ryan level of spectacle, but offers a bit more in the way of dramatic coherence. What a curious way it has, however, of representing for us the vast slaughterhouse of the Battle of Stalingrad—that is, as a solo duel between a Russian…

Another sensitive British evocation of childhood with a brilliant child actor — but one whose focus keeps shifting to the old folks

Movie illnesses used to be the kind of thing that beautiful young women contracted. The silent killer was sure in its work, but it always left them looking in the pink when they finally breathed their last. They were still beautiful, but now also charged with pathos. Looking on them you might says, as Romeo…

Waiting for Guffman is the cheapest of cheap comedy. All it takes is our suspension of disbelief (easy in New York and L.A.) that the rubes in fly-over country could be as witless and unhip as they are presented as being here. Hip is our new class marker: snobbery on the basis of race or…

The English version of the title of Amores Perros, written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is given by its distributors as Love is a Bitch, though this seems to be something of an unhappy compromise, suggesting one of those assembly-line romantic comedies cranked out by Hollywood to exploit the fame of…