Heaven Can Wait

Mr Jealousy directed by Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming) is the kind of film that young filmmakers ought to be making, and that I approve of in theory. But I’m afraid it is just not very good. The jokes in this would-be romantic comedy for the ’90s fall mostly short of being funny, the characters…

Star Trek: Insurrection, directed by Jonathan Frakes, is another black- box movie — which is to say a movie that elevates the deus ex machina into a guiding principle. I know that I risk offending a lot of Trekkies who are used to this kind of thing, but I find it merely boring. Every time…

Bad jokes are like rotten apples: it only takes a few of them to spoil the whole barrel. Company Man, a co-written, co-directed effort by Douglas McGrath and Peter Askin, starts off very promisingly. Its jokes are crisp and tart and juicy. But not long into it we take our first bite of the rotten…

What a lot of fantastical narrative machinery is employed to make an embarrassingly banal point

A brutish husband, two funny girlfriends, a handsome doctor, folksy Andy Griffith and pie — could this be a recipe for a chick flick?

Divided We Fall by Jan Hrebejk, adapting a novel by Petr Jarchovsky is a very Czech film: charming, warm-hearted, funny, humane and philosophical—a velvet revolution sort of movie. Set before, during and just after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, its characters are all humble, flawed but decent folk coping as best they can with the…