Bonnie and Clyde

Holy Smoke by Jane Campion is a movie whose most basic assumptions—arising out of a weirdly anachronistic, 1970s-vintage view of bourgeois life—makes it rather difficult to like. From the first glimpse she gives us of “Sans Souci, Sydney,” an overhead shot of acres of tiled-roof bungalows that bespeaks “suburbia,” we know that Miss Campion’s sympathies…

Chinese Box by Wayne Wang stars Jeremy Irons as John, a journalist living in Hong Kong in the months leading up to the handover of the colony by the British to the Chinese. He learns that he’s got leukemia and has approximately as long to live as the British presence in the territory will last….

It’s sad to see a talented filmmaker like Steven Soderbergh descend to the quasi-propaganda and pure schlock of Erin Brockovich. Julia Roberts plays the eponymous Erin, a nasty, unpleasant foul-mouthed harridan meant to be both attractive and admirable to us because, I guess, she is Julia Roberts and doing feisty. Be feisty, Julia. And Julia…

Bossa Nova, an adaptation of a story by Sérgio Sant’Anna (“A Senhorita Simpson”) by the Brazilian director Bruno Barreto, seems to have been conceived as a vehicle for the latter’s wife, the former Mrs. Steven Spielberg, Amy Irving. She plays Mary Anne, an American widow living in Rio and teaching English to upwardly mobile Cariocas,…

Having once lived in the area served by Channel 6 (Harrisburg, York, Lancaster, Lebanon), where Russ Richards (John Travolta) works as celebrity weather man in Nora Ephron’s amusing Lucky Numbers, I can assure you that not everybody in Central Pennsylvania is a moron. Nor would anyone but a supercilious Hollywood type suppose that “Harrisburg’s most…

Remember the Titans, directed by Boaz Yakin and written by Gregory Allen Howard, is another in the seemingly endless parade of Hollywood’s self-congratulatory retellings of the civil rights story of the 1960s. Combining it with a classic (not to say clichéic) football story about a high school team’s undefeated season makes the pill of sanctimoniousness…