Postman Always Rings Twice, The

The Tao of Steve by Jenniphr Goodman is a likeable little slacker film set in (or near) Santa Fe, but a little too top-heavy with talk — in particular philosophical talk — as many indy first films by would-be intellectuals tend to be. We mustn’t be too hard on them. And the idea is a…

Wonderland by Michael Winterbottom is the second British film this year to adapt to London the ambitious American treatment of Los Angeles by Robert Altman in Short Cuts or the San Fernando Valley by Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia. The other was Beautiful People by Jasmin Dizdar which, though not a bad film, lost its…

Hélas! The good-humored detachment and optimism that François Truffaut brought to the French cinema seems to have died with him. Barring the rare exception, like last year’s Un Air de Famille by Cédric Klappisch, each new French film that manages to get itself released in this country seems to try to outdo the last in…

You knew that Mulan, the latest extrusion from the Satanic Mills of the Disney animation shop, had reached its intended audience when you saw the headline of Janet Maslin’s review in the New York Times: “A Warrior, She Takes on Huns and Stereotypes.” Someone ought to do a study on what it is that makes…

There is scarcely a cliché of the 1990s Hollywood thriller that is not to be found in Switchback, written and directed by Jeb Stuart. By now, the figure of the serial killer — so rare in nature, so common in the movies — has become such a familiar one that a filmmaker like Stuart will…

A fascinating document for future scholars writing the history of the American celebrity culture