They Were Expendable (1945)

Every few years around Christmas time, Steven Spielberg feels the need to trot out his social conscience for public examination. Four years ago it was Schindler’s List, a film designed to show how bad the Holocaust was. This year it is Amistad—the story of a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish ship in 1839 which created…

Every so often a reader writes asking me to lighten up, to stop looking so closely at the movies I review and just relax and enjoy them. I always wonder why people would bother reading a critic who did that. Could they not relax and enjoy a movie themselves unless they could reassure themselves that…

Alas for Haiti! Its rulers are crooks and thugs, its religion is voodoo and its heroes are communists

What? You didn’t think Macbeth was a comedy? Where have you been? This movie does for Shakespeare what Clueless did for Jane Austen, and it is at least as funny.

Poor Meg Ryan can’t seem to find a decent role in which she is allowed to be a grown-up. Whose idea was it to try making her a boxing manager dressed like a hooker?

To the list of things we wouldn’t know if Hollywood didn’t tell us we have added this summer the fact that mechanical people will one day be better-designed than the original, organic models, that the Japanese in 1941 were a noble and warlike race whose bombing of Pearl Harbor was justified but regretted even as…