Manchurian Candidate, The (1962)

An amusing but slight adaptation of a Nick Hornby novel which can laugh at its characters without precluding the possibility that they may laugh at themselves

A Friend of the Deceased (Un Ami du Défunt), a Franco-Ukrainian film directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich and written—in Russian—by Andrei Kourkov, has a very attractive premiss. Tolia (Alexandre Lazarev), a translator living in Kiev and living a hand-to-mouth, hustling sort of existence not untypical of life in the former Soviet Union, finds that his rather…

I Love You, Don’t Touch Me is a charming little film by Julie Davis that has intelligence, wit, humor, good acting, good writing, good music and almost all things going for it —apart from being facile and unconvincing in its main point. This is that, as the gorgeous heroine, Katie (Marla Schaffel)—who is of course…

A moving account of the kidnap and murder of Daniel Pearl in 2002 which is, nevertheless, a little too self-regarding

It is with some reluctance that I add my voice to the chorus of praise that has greeted Chicken Run, the latest from Nick Park’s and Peter Lord’s Aardman animation shop (now operating under the aegis of DreamWorks). It would have been more satisfying to think of this film as I had grown used to…

Who, I wonder, is the intended audience for movies like Thirteen Days? Of course we know who it is that makes them. Kevin Costner, in spite of a string of self-indulgent flops is still a big enough star to be allowed to indulge himself a bit further. And of course when two or three are…