In Which We Serve (1942)

The fantastical superhero makes the transition from childish wish-fulfilment to adult castration nightmare. Is this progress?

Fools Rush In by Andy Tennant offers us mildly engaging characters and an even more mildly witty screenplay but cannot escape the clichés of its plot—which, when you boil it down, is nothing more than the old work-family conflict. All this romance—and there is a potential romance here of some charm—only so that yet another…

Once upon a time, Hollywood’s stock-in-trade was the “wom-jeop” movie, designed to appeal to the chivalrous instincts of the boys and young men for whom it was intended by placing an attractive woman in jeopardy and then supplying a handsome young hero with whom the youths could identify themselves to rescue her. Its post-feminist equivalent…

A harrowing portrayal of an atrocity that no one should see — or want to see

The version of Wolfgang Petersen’s classic Das Boot now arriving in your neighborhood multiplexes is a new director’s cut of the version of 1982 which adds over an hour of original footage to bring the film to an epic three and a half hours in length. The time flies. This is perhaps the best war…

Dr Doolittle, directed by Betty Thomas, stars Eddie Murphy as the eponymous doctor who can talk to the animals. For the nineties, all the whimsy of Hugh Lofting’s literary creation and the earlier film version starring Rex Harrison has given way to post-modern joking as celebrity voices are put into animal mouths and made to…