Defending Your Life

First westerns, then horror films, now gangster flicks: all the great Hollywood genres have been appropriated by the spoofters and turned from serious melodrama— in living memory, the movies have become the one place in the aesthetic world where the expression is not an oxymoron— into comedy and parody. Hard on the heels of this…

An unforgettable docu-drama about a climbing accident in the Andes nearly 20 years ago which is still being talked about among mountaineers

A bleak, Third World love story that requires — but does not necessarily repay — a good deal of patience

Double Jeopardy, directed by Bruce Beresford, is the latest example of what is coming to be one of Hollywood’s favorite new genres: the female paranoia movie. Like The Astronaut’s Wife of a few weeks ago, it deliberately sets out to exploit the sort of insecurity that has become endemic, in some ways the most destructive…

A classic reissued in time for Mardi Gras remains well worth-seeing

Some people are fiddling with one of the greatest classics of the American popular culture without, apparently, knowing what they’ve got their hands on