Heaven Can Wait

Once again, Clint Eastwood reaches after profundity and compassion but can grasp only conventional emotions and beliefs

The Astronaut’s Wife, by Rand Ravich, is like the Alien movies in being a kind of mythologization of modern female insecurities about sex and childbearing. Commander Spencer Armacost (Johnny Depp) is a mystery from the beginning. Apparently deeply attached to his wife, Jillian (Charlize Theron), to the point of uxoriousness, he is also very much…

A girl who pretends to be deaf and a real bad dad don’t end up adding very much of interest to a routine high school melodrama

Deep Impact, directed by Mimi Leder from a script by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, is one of what I take to be a new breed of Hollywood disaster flicks. Modeled on Independence Day, these are apocalyptic in scale, overburdened with special effects and pitched to a younger teen audience, but they are still…

Did you know that gossip can be vicious and destructive—especially when false rumors are deliberately planted by idle and amoral youths just to see what happens? No? Then Gossip, directed by Davis Guggenheim and written by Gregory Poirier, is definitely the movie for you. Even if you did know these things but have a glossy-magazine…

Regeneration directed by Gillies Mackinnon from a screenplay by Allan Scott and based on the novel by Pat Barker is another retelling of the great left wing myth to come out of the Great War: that it was all the generals’ fault. “Half the seed of Europe,” to use Wilfred Owen’s angry poetic formulation, were…