Postman Always Rings Twice, The

Swept from the Sea by Beeban Kidron is a ludicrously overblown adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s short story, “Amy Foster.” Now the first and absolutely essential thing for you to know about Conrad’s Amy is that she was — how shall we say? — of the canine kind with regard to feminine pulchritude. Also stupid. Conrad…

House of Sand (Casa de Areia), by the Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington from a screenplay by Elena Soárez, is a woman’s picture, set in a masculine — indeed, a heroic — landscape which dwarfs the men and animals making their painful way across it in the opening scenes. What we see are the wild and…

Taste of Cherry by the Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, is not for those whose idea of movie fun is explosions and shootings, yet its concerns with matters of life and death are no less exigent for that. Over the opening credits, Mr Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) is cruising in his Range Rover, peering intently at knots…

Edward Burns’s young career as a director has gone from promising (The Brothers McMullin) to flabby (She’s the One) to utterly self-indulgent and silly in his latest and, I hope, last film, No Looking Back. The big idea here is to take that over-familiar and by now thoroughly boring conceit of the 1950s (most recently…

A bit of magical realism that is too heavy on the magic and too light on the realism