Place in the Sun, A

The Ice Storm, directed by Ang Lee from a screenplay by James Schamus, based on a novel by Rick Moody, is a very moving film which, nevertheless, ultimately undermines its own emotional force by trying, after the manner of so many recent movies, to be as much an historical as a literary statement. For what,…

Hard Eight is a brilliant little film by Paul Thomas Anderson, who also wrote the screenplay. It is a retelling (sort of) of Shakespeare’s Tempest set in the seedy but ever-atmospheric world of Nevada gambling dens. It begins with a castaway called John (John C. Reilly), washed up outside “Jack’s Coffee Shop” somewhere along a…

The Iron Giant, directed by Brad Bird, is an animated adaptation of Ted Hughes’s fable which recruits it for a role in Hollywood’s continuing attempts to re-mythologize the 1950s according to “progressive” notions. The old mythology, now long discredited so far as Hollywood and the media are concerned, was that during that period God-fearing Americans…

Another example of old-fashioned, plot-driven movie-making for grown-ups from the director of A Separation

Kevin Costner’s love affair with Kevin Costner continues — and spoils what might otherwise have been a decent picture

John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes makes the typical mistake of movies that attempt to satirize the celebrity-obsessed media culture of which, inevitably, they themselves are a part. In fact, so reliably do movies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers or Costa Gavras’s Mad City get it wrong that the suspicious-minded might be tempted to think that…