Act of Valor

Nothing to Lose, written and directed by Steve Oedekerk, stars Tim Robbins as Nick, an advertising executive in Los Angeles who is carjacked by “T” (Martin Lawrence) while in a state of shock over his apparent discovery of his wife, Ann (Kelly Preston), in bed with his boss, Phil (Michael McKean). Sittiing at an intersection…

Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon is worth seeing for two reasons. One is the remarkable performance of Jim Carrey as the late comic and performance artist (as we should call him today), Andy Kaufman. I confess that I have always numbered myself among the Carrey-skeptics, and cannot remember a single performance of his that…

Shanghai Noon, directed by Tom Dey from a script by Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, is a spoof- Western in the manner of Blazing Saddles but with two main differences from Mel Brooks’s classic. One is that it is 26 years further away from the sort of conventions of the genre that Blazing Saddles was…

The Jackal, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, is a formula blockbuster and a complete artistic void. The only interesting thing about it to me was the chance it afforded to spot the trends as to what ingredients go into the formula this year. For example, the macho man who has an on-screen homosexual kiss looks as…

The full length version of my review of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux which appeared in a shortened form in the September-October American Spectator

Dr. T. and the Women is a typical Robert Altman film in being sprawling and incoherent and full of more or less purposeless and unresolved activity, but also typical in showing flashes of brilliance. Nor does it surprise that Altman is going in for a lot of sentimentalizing about women these days, since it gives…