Full Metal Jacket (1987)

A well-made film that teaches an obnoxious lesson

I wouldn’t want it to be thought that I was piling on. Anyone who might otherwise have been tempted to see Battlefield Earth will need no discouragement from me to make him think better of the idea. I don’t know if I would go quite so far as the critic who called it “the worst…

Who lives by the plot shall die by the plot. Copland, written and directed by James Mangold, is an old-fashioned, plot-driven, realistic thriller that almost succeeds but that falls down because of a central incoherence in the plot. The problem is this. Everything depends on the far reaching ramifications of what happens one night to…

The reverse of a feel-good film is a Michael Haneke film — but doesn’t he do them well!

At a certain age, almost everyone is inclined to see his mother as a suffering saint and his father as a bully and a tyrant. It is a part of the process of growing up and corresponds with a youth’s period of greatest need to declare independence him- or herself from the paternal tie. It…

At one point in Space Cowboys, William “Hawk” Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones) says to Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood): “Old Age just brings out more of the Frank in you, Frank” The same could be said of Eastwood himself. Like pretty much all of the films he has been unwise enough to try directing, this one…