Defending Your Life

Robert Duvall and his fetching companion, Luciana Pedraza, are fun to watch on the dance floor, but the movie he has built round those scenes is a pretty feeble one.

Maybe Ali McGraw couldn’t have managed it, but one would have liked to see the beautiful and talented Leelee Sobieski given a chance to move an audience without having to die. Alas, it was not to be. Here On Earth, written by Michael Seitzman and directed by Mark Piznarski, is a remake of Love Story…

Walkabout by Nicholas Roeg has joined the ever lengthening list of film classics on re-release this spring, like the Star Wars triology, the Godfather, Das Boot (in a new version), Pink Flamingos and even The Big Sleep. More than any of these others — more even than Star Wars (nothing dates like futurism) — Walkabout…

Twice Upon a Yesterday, whose British title was The Man With Rain in His Shoes, was directed by Maria Ripoll as a pretty transparent imitation of Sliding Doors but without very much of that film’s wit or stylishness. I have nothing in principle against this kind of metaphysical fable and think of its great exemplar,…

Who’d have thought it? It seems that somewhere in Hollywood’s parallel universe the Sharks and the Jets are still rumbling.

Love and Death on Long Island, directed by Richard Kwietniowski from a novel by Gilbert Adair, is not really about death. Its title puns on the name of its principal character, played by John Hurt, who is called Giles De’Ath. But it might as well have been called De’Ath in Venice, since it is all…