Frozen

The Pillow Book by Peter Greenaway is a typical Greenaway blend of the bizarre, the disgusting and the boring. Especially the boring. You wouldn’t think it, would you? That a man could concentrate so exclusively on weird sexual fetishes (in this case, a woman’s desire to have her body written on — and then to…

The Designated Mourner, written by Wallace Shawn and directed by David Hare, is chiefly remarkable for the fact that it shows Mike Nichols can act. Or at least overact. It’s hard to tell if it is Mr Shawn’s overheated writing, Mr Hare’s spare, intense directing or Mr Nichols’s own natural hamminess, but the overall effect…

You know when, in the course of watching The Avengers by Jeremiah Chechnik, you see Uma Thurman grappling with herself, while dressed in a rubber cat-suit, on top of a hot air balloon which is itself on the top of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, which is seen against the snowy backdrop of an apparently…

Mr Jealousy directed by Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming) is the kind of film that young filmmakers ought to be making, and that I approve of in theory. But I’m afraid it is just not very good. The jokes in this would-be romantic comedy for the ’90s fall mostly short of being funny, the characters…

The Dogme 95 movement produces another winner — a feel-good movie whose effects are not cheap. Or not very cheap.

[See “Entry from July 23, 2008” under “My Diary”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe