Stairway to Heaven (A Matter of Life and Death)

There is an essential bit of information about the plot of Open Your Eyes (in Spanish Abre Los Ojos), directed by Alejandro Amenábar, which is withheld until almost the end of the film and which, because I think it just about worth seeing, I will not reveal here. But it is worth knowing that it…

The movie it took twelve years to make — about a childhood that appears to be taking much, much longer

The Dreamlife of Angels (in French La Vie Revée des Anges) by Érick Zonca is by far the best picture I have seen this year and one of the best I have ever seen. I can’t remember the last time I came staggering out of a movie, as I did out of this one, literally…

As I watched Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, I kept asking myself why this movie was being made. The decrepitude of its subject matter is obvious from its very first scenes when we see the eponymous Mr Ripley (Matt Damon) accompanying a lieder singer at a private recital for…

The Protestant Reformation? Eric Till appears not to have heard of it. But of course that doesn’t stop his Martin Luther from being a hero of our time

M:I-2, directed by John Woo and written by Robert Towne, is like the original Mission Impossible (1996) in being a postmodern-style romance of technology. The earlier film, which was directed by Brian de Palma, did for the deus ex machina what Shakespeare did for the Aristotelian unities, which is to say that it blew the…