Fargo

A movie more sympathetic than you would expect towards religious experience, but not really very much interested in it

When J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World had its premiere in Dublin in 1907 there were riots in the streets because the play was thought to be a vicious slander on the Irish people. Synge had seemed to suggest that it was characteristic of the Irish blarney, at least among the rural folk that…

This well-made French film by Cédric Kahn re-examines the relationship between civilization and savagery. Again.

Whatever by Susan Skoog stars Liza Weil as Anna Stockard and Chad Morgan as her slutty friend Brenda, two high school girls in 1981 who do the standard “survivors” turn on behalf of the I-am-womanism of Ms Skoog. It follows the by-now familiar path of mythologizing and romanticising the sufferings of women, particularly young, post-pubertal…

"In short measures life may perfect be." — Ben Jonson

Gross-out comedies are now as much a tradition of the summer movie season as the special-effects blockbusters — and sometimes the two are hard to tell one from another. Scary Movie, which shot to the top of the list of box office grosses (if you’ll pardon the expression) in the week after it opened, purports…