Third Man, The

A funny and well-observed chick-flick that, nevertheless, never quite gets us beyond the recognition that it’s hell being a woman.

Britain may be the only country in the world where it is still possible to make movies which glorify and romanticize and sentimentalize an old-fashioned view of masculinity—and have it come off looking progressive. Last spring we had Brassed Off which traded off its romantic notions of a stag-line of Yorkshire coal-miners down t’pit or…

Enough, already! We know that movie folk are compassionate people. Why do they have to keep making Holocaust dramas to persuade us of the fact?

Beautiful People, written and directed by Jasmin Dizdar, is what we might call a Rodney King movie—a relatively harmless, feel-good concoction of a familiar kind which asks, rhetorically, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Of course, neither Jasmin Dizdar nor Rodney King is interested in any answer there may be to their question. Instead,…

Earlier this year, in a review of Panic by Henry Bromell, I observed that it was possible to appreciate a film which is an impressive bit of propaganda for a political position with which you profoundly disagree. Just think of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will. Nowadays, the most assiduous ideologues among film-makers are…

A gross and vulgar movie without even the excuse of being very funny