Pursuit of Happyness, The

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…

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,…

The best moment in the new movie-version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Michael Hoffman, comes as Bottom (Kevin Kline) in the form of an ass is transported to the bower of Titania, the Fairy Queen (Michelle Pfeiffer), who has fallen in love with him (as the Shakespeareans among you will remember) because of…

[See “Entry from July 8, 2009” under “My Diary”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

A fascinating documentary tracing the history of a favorite terrorist technique, but one a bit too ready to take the terrorists at their own valuation

A throwback to the days when Hollywood went in for moralism, this movie is marred by its treatment of mental illness