Defending Your Life

The only thing Sharon Pollack’s Everything Relative has going for it is its political correctness. Billed as “a lesbian Big Chill” the film is amateurish, self-indulgent, stupid, sentimental, politically tendentious, ill written, ill-acted and ill-directed, but, by golly, it hews to the Party line without the slightest deviation. Pro-choice, pro-left, anti-Christian, anti-conservative: all its views…

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

It used to be said of anything that sounded overwrought and over-writerly that it “smelled of the lamp” — because the author was supposed to have had to stay up late to think of all the labored and artificial expressions he uses. Trixie, directed and co-written (with John Binder) by Alan Rudolph doesn’t just smell…

Nettoyage à Sec (Dry Cleaning) by Anne Fontaine presents us with a French version of that now familiar Hollywood trope, merely gestured towards in 8mm, the capacity for sexual adventurism and even perversion in all of us. Nicole (Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie (Charles Berling) have been married for 15 years and run a dry-cleaning establishment in…

La Séparation, directed by Christian Vincent from a screenplay written by himself and Dan Franck, tells the story of the unraveling of a marriage, except that it is not a marriage. Pierre (Daniel Auteuil), a book illustrator, and Anne (Isabelle Huppert), who is some kind of professional or businesswoman, have lived together for years, and…

Goodbye Lover, directed by Roland Joffé, is yet another inadequate attempt by Hollywood to recapture the look and feel, if not the spirit, of 1940s vintage films noirs. But as I noted in my review of L.A. Confidential, of which this is surely a stable-mate, the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. It has…