Between Two Worlds

A beautiful if harrowing film about a clash between medieval and modern in which neither looks much like a winner

A Map of the World, adapted by Peter Hedges and Polly Platt from the novel by Jane Hamilton and directed by Scott Elliott, is essentially an Oprah movie that rises above the level we might expect of such a thing—at least until the end when it tries to tidy things up with far too neat…

The best thing about Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, written and directed by the Englishman, Guy Ritchie, is the plot. Long before Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction revolutionized the noir style of thriller and brought back the gangster movie in a new form, a tightly constructed, intricate plot was one of the…

Happy, Texas, directed by Mark Illsley, is an intermittently funny tale of two escaped convicts who steal a recreational vehicle and find themselves forced to maintain their cover by impersonating a couple of gay organizers of little-girl beauty pageants. Jeremy Northam, an excellent British actor with a very good American accent, and Steve Zahn are…

The novel was a best-seller in the US and a massive best-seller in the UK, so maybe people will be glad to see the movie. I wasn’t.

A heroic German dissident of the Second World War partially overcomes the recent antipathy of the movies towards religious heroes