Defending Your Life

It’s too bad that the people in Dwight Little’s Murder at 1600 don’t know, postmodern style, that they are in a movie. It would have saved them an awful lot of trouble spent working out who it was that killed the attractive blonde in the White House one rainy night. Of course everybody’s first answer…

The Thief directed by Pavel Chukhrai is a deeply moving meditation on family and fatherhood told from the point of view of Sanya (Misha Philipchuk) the six year old son of the beautiful Katya (Yekaterina Rednikova). His father having died of wounds shortly after the end of the Second World War, Sanya was born in…

Happy, Texas, directed by Mark Illsley, is an intermittently funny tale of two escaped convicts who steal a recreational vehicle and find themselves forced to maintain their cover by impersonating a couple of gay organizers of little-girl beauty pageants. Jeremy Northam, an excellent British actor with a very good American accent, and Steve Zahn are…

Rather like Safe Men, Return to Paradise, directed by Joseph Ruben (Sleeping With the Enemy, Money Train), is worth seeing even though it has a tendency to make light of criminal behavior. In this case, the criminal behavior is drug-taking. Three American friends, Sheriff (Vince Vaughn), Lewis (Joaquin Phoenix) and Tony (David Conrad) vacation in…

A very watchable version of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel that is better than its authors’ recent form but still not so good as the first movie version

The original was pretty dire, but the re-make is unspeakably awful