Between Two Worlds

You’d think that Richard Curtis would have reduced the Hugh Grant romantic comedy to a formula by now, but by branching out like this, he has only made a mess

Another illustration of the melancholy truth that you can’t get a quart into a pint pot — or, perhaps, a Victorian novel into a Hollywood film.

A thoughtful and very watchable film whose performance does not quite match its ambition

A Friend of the Deceased (Un Ami du Défunt), a Franco-Ukrainian film directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich and written—in Russian—by Andrei Kourkov, has a very attractive premiss. Tolia (Alexandre Lazarev), a translator living in Kiev and living a hand-to-mouth, hustling sort of existence not untypical of life in the former Soviet Union, finds that his rather…

A too-busy but still enjoyable account of part of the life of the author of The Adventures of Peter Rabbit

Hurlyburly directed by Anthony Drazan and written (from his stageplay) by David Rabe has an all-star cast, but it cannot escape from the poverty of its script, in which nothing very much happens (people come and go) and all the characters talk exactly alike—that is in a kind of souped-up psychobabble with an occasionally Pinterian…