Hurt Locker, The (2008)

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…

Mad City, directed by Costa-Gavras, has a good subject, but it can’t seem to stay focused on it. The director, known for such anti-American films as Z and Salvador, here ostensibly changes his subject to the media. Now I yield to no one in my dislike of the media, and especially of television newsmen, but…

Wild America by William Dear is an engaging kiddie movie, supposedly based on the true story of a family of prominent naturalist-filmmakers, which will provide some wholesome thrills with its peeks at life and wildlife through the eyes of three boys growing up in Arkansas in the late 1960s. Unfortunately, Dear is not content to…

Agnès Jaoui’s terrrific new movie, Look at Me, begins in a taxicab as the passenger (Marilou Berry), attempts to get the surly driver (Jean-Pierre Lazzerini) to turn down the radio so that she can hear what someone is saying to her on her mobile phone. When her father (Jean-Pierre Bacri) gets into the cab, he…

One thing you can say for One Night at McCool’s, directed by Harald Zwart and written by Stan Seidel, is that it is funny. Not subtle or meaningful or profound or even interesting but funny. Maybe that’s enough to make it worth seeing. The trouble is that, in the intervals of trying and (mostly) succeeding…

More evidence that pandering to teenage wish-fulfilment fantasies has taken the place of Hollywood’s old-fashioned style of earnest moralizing