Manchurian Candidate, The (1962)

A Puerto Rican charmer should have stayed a drug dealer and not got mixed up with those crooks on Wall Street.

Boogie Nights has been hailed in advance as a contemporary classic and its director, Paul Thomas Anderson, as the new Tarantino. Well, maybe. But where I could see in Pulp Fiction and others of Mr Tarantino’s early works what all the fuss was about, even if I was a bit skeptical, in the case of…

Like Felicia’s Journey, Patricia Rozema’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is a film whose other virtues—in particular, the visual evocation of Regency England and the excellence of the performances of Frances O’Connor as the heroine, Fanny Price, Alessandro Nivola and Embeth Davidtz as the charming brother and sister, Henry and Mary Crawford, and Jonny…

A lightweight comedy about the role of an obscure Texas congressman in ending the Cold War is about as near to being patriotic as Hollywood allows itself to get these days

All by itself, X-men seems to have turned around Hollywood’s summer, earning $57.5 million in its opening weekend (more than any other July film, ever) and making a lacklustre box office into something not far short of boffo. As to an adult sensibility (but who has one of those anymore?) this techno-fantasy may look all…

A Map of the World, adapted by Peter Hedges and Polly Platt from the novel by Jane Hamilton and directed by Scott Elliott, is essentially an Oprah movie that rises above the level we might expect of such a thing—at least until the end when it tries to tidy things up with far too neat…