Heaven Can Wait

Enough, already! We know that movie folk are compassionate people. Why do they have to keep making Holocaust dramas to persuade us of the fact?

Character by Mike Van Diem, the Dutch winner of the Academy Award for best foreign film, is an astonishingly old fashioned picture, of a sort (here is a sobering thought) that simply could not be made in America today. Some representative of the feminist thought police would have got to it long before it was…

Hard Rain by Mikael Salomon could have been and almost is a really competently managed thriller. Half-way through it I was weighing up whether it deserved one or two stars and delighting in what I took to be an unexpected throwback to the old days in Hollywood when the stories the movies told were tough…

The Dinner Game, as the untranslatable Dîner de Cons is awkwardly but decorously rendered, is an uproarious French farce by Francis Veber, co-author of La Cage Aux Folles and creator on his own of a number of other plays and films in a similar style. It tells the story of Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte), a…

Anastasia, made for Fox by the disaffected Disney animators Don Bluth and Gary Goldman was deeply depressing for me to watch—not because it is shoddy filmmaking but because there is so much obvious talent here employed in falsifying reality for no good reason. Of course it doesn’t do for one to be too much the…

One True Thing, directed by the excellent Carl Franklin (Devil in the Blue Dress and that Arkansas movie with Billy Bob Thornton) and based on the novel by Anna Quindlen, suffers from trying to do too much. It is really three separate stories that are like plants grown too close together, all fighting for the…