Remember the Night (1940)

What? You don’t buy Angelina Jolie in the role of Sherlock Holmes, the FBI’s ace sleuth who falls for a serial killer? Too bad. Warner Brothers and D.J. Caruso think you’ll go see it anyway.

Deep Impact, directed by Mimi Leder from a script by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, is one of what I take to be a new breed of Hollywood disaster flicks. Modeled on Independence Day, these are apocalyptic in scale, overburdened with special effects and pitched to a younger teen audience, but they are still…

Seven Years in Tibet from Tri-Star, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, stars the egregious Brad Pitt as Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountain climber in the Himalayas who is interned by the British in India as an enemy alien at the outbreak of the Second World War. He and his fellow Teuton climber, Peter Aufschnaiter (David Thewlis)…

A charming, unpretentious little movie from Mexico that gradually reveals to us hidden depths and a surprising emotional power

La Vita è Bella or Life is Beautiful was directed and co-written by Roberto Benigni, who stars as Guido Orefice, a Jewish waiter in Arezzo before the war. He woos and wins his wife, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), whom he calls la principessa — the princess — in memorably comic and romantic style and manages to…

So now I guess it’s official. After Analyze This, Mickey Blue Eyes, The Sopranos and other recent fictional treatments of the Mafia, along comes Michael Dinner’s The Crew to confirm that, so far from being the frightening organized crime syndicate we used to think it was, the mob is now to be considered as just…