Heaven Can Wait

There is a scene in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair in which the hero, a novelist called Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes), and his married lover, Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore), go to a movie based on one of one of Bendrix’s novels. As they sit in the smoke-filled fleapit, we…

Like most Hollywood attempts at satire, Dick, directed by Andrew Fleming, falls into the fatal trap of becoming too cozy with the object of its satirical attentions. This is a pity because there are many good and funny things in it. It would have been a great movie if it could have kept its focus…

The Mighty directed by Peter Chelsom and based on the novel by Rodman Philbrick, is at least an improvement annoying Simon Birch of last month, though it uses essentially the same device: doomed crippled kid who is nevertheless smart as a whip (I have known a lot of crippled kids, by the way, and never…

M by Fritz Lang, first made in 1931, has now been reissued in a new and refurbished print and is a film which movie buffs all ought to rush out to see. The use of the camera and the visual imagery and composition in this story of what we should nowadays call a serial killer,…

Office Space, written and directed by the great creator of “Beavis and Butthead,” Mike Judge, is really two movies jammed into one. Up until the very funny moment at which its hero, Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) tells the Two Bobs (John C. McGinley and Paul Wilson) — efficiency experts brought in to recommend to his…

A slacker comedy with some tentative and swiftly-disregarded pretensions to seriousness