Pursuit of Happyness, The

That icky little left-wing prole, Robert Altman, amuses himself by satirizing his social betters. Does that make you feel better about yourself?

Hollywood misses yet another chance to say something meaningful to teenagers, preferring as usual to flatter them

It is, I believe, always a mistake to criticize a movie for not being the book it is based on—or, indeed, for not being anything at all. Every artist deserves the courtesy of being assessed on the basis of what he tried to do and not on that of what he didn’t try to do….

A lovely and heart-felt film from the Chinese director, Chen Kaige, reminds us of what Hollywood used to do so well but does no more

Let’s stipulate that teenage sexual energy and the sorts of things it drives the young’uns to get up to are inherently funny subjects. Shakespeare has the grumbling old shepherd in The Winter’s Tale say: “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is…

A form of pathography in which the audience is kept at arm’s length from the hero/heroine by the compassion he/she demands of it