Third Man, The

A festival of unashamed Hollywood fakery by a director who ought to know better

Happiness, written and directed by Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Doll’s House), is a sort of twin of Neil Labute’s Your Friends and Neighbors. Both these young, independent filmmakers are reacting against Hollywood fakery and sentimentality by presenting us with horrifyingly funny looks at the sexual manners and mores of late-century America. What Jason Patric’s…

Of The Edge, written by David Mamet and directed by Lee Tamahori, it must be said that we should be grateful for what it does not do. It does not make the billionaire, Charles Morris (Anthony Hopkins) into a predictable rich-man villain, or even into a soulless, unpleasant character who stands aside as the real…

My Life So Far, directed by Hugh Hudson from a memoir called Son of Adam by Sir Denis Forman, former director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is rather slight but utterly charming. Lit with the soft backglow of memory, it presents the Oedipal conflict between young Fraser Pettigrew (Robert Norman) and his eccentric…

A life-long master of publicity hits the jackpot one more time.

Hallaleujah, it’s a miracle! The Apostle is a (more or less) mainstream Hollywood film that neither patronizes nor trivializes nor demonizes religion. Written and directed by and starring Robert Duvall, the picture is a tour de force for Mr Duvall, who has given himself a wonderfully juicy part as the itinerant evangelist Sonny Dewey, a.k.a….