Heaven Can Wait

Another cinematic exercise in drinking deep from the intoxicating stream of popular paranoia

An unintentional experiment by the National Endowment for the Arts to show that any time you put war and “art” together you get anti-war propaganda

Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet is a good example of Shakespeare killed by terminal hipness. It is remarkably clever, and even has some good dramatic ideas. Having Juliet (Claire Danes) wake up just before Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) drinks the poison and simply cutting Friar Lawrence (Pete Postlethwaite) out of it is an interesting notion and…

Clay Pigeons, directed by David Dobkin and written by Matt Healy purports to take place in Montana, though in fact it takes place in Movieland, or that province of it which has been colonized by Quentin Tarantino and all the Taranteenies. You know you are in this part of the world when everyone you meet…

Even raw propaganda can do the rounds of the documentary circuit, apparently, so long as it is anti-American propaganda

Artistic innovation tends to follow a pattern, which begins with the reaction of the young rebels against the prevailing style, after its tricks become too familiar. So Wordsworth and Coleridge’s manifesto in the preface to the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads drew attention to the tired “poetic diction” of the time and called for a…