Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Having once lived in the area served by Channel 6 (Harrisburg, York, Lancaster, Lebanon), where Russ Richards (John Travolta) works as celebrity weather man in Nora Ephron’s amusing Lucky Numbers, I can assure you that not everybody in Central Pennsylvania is a moron. Nor would anyone but a supercilious Hollywood type suppose that “Harrisburg’s most…

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

I hope it will not sound too relativistic of me to say that each age has its own moral needs. In the late Victorian era people needed to hear—though not nearly so much as they might have needed to hear a few years earlier or later—that mercy and forgiveness and forbearance to sinners was holy…

Imagine a more up-to-date, slick-looking Norwegian version of a “Twilight Zone” episode

As Enchanted April showed a few years ago, Italy is the promised land for the cold, sexually-repressed, work- obsessed Englishman or, more likely, Englishwoman. At least it is for the English who imagine themselves as having been kitted out by their climate or their religion or their national character with such a load of what…

A heroic tale of the sexual revolution which can be judged either by the heroism or by the sexual revolution