Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942)

That Carlos Reygadas, boy genius, keeps his plot mostly out of sight suggests that he is embarrassed by it — and rightly so

Just imagine what you would get if the director of Trainspotting turned his hand to romantic comedy and, sure enough, that’s pretty much what you get with Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary. As with Trainspotting and their earlier hit, Shallow Grave, Boyle is joined by Andrew Macdonald (producer) and John Hodge (writer), but by…

Touch by Paul Schrader, based on a twenty year old novel by Elmore Leonard, has an appealing premiss but with no idea of what to do with it. The premiss is that a young former Franciscan calling himself Juvenal (Skeet Ulrich), but whose real name is Charles Lawson, returns from a missionary calling in the…

An unforgettable series of interviews with the first men — and perhaps the last — ever to set foot on another world

Edward Burns’s young career as a director has gone from promising (The Brothers McMullin) to flabby (She’s the One) to utterly self-indulgent and silly in his latest and, I hope, last film, No Looking Back. The big idea here is to take that over-familiar and by now thoroughly boring conceit of the 1950s (most recently…

John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes makes the typical mistake of movies that attempt to satirize the celebrity-obsessed media culture of which, inevitably, they themselves are a part. In fact, so reliably do movies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers or Costa Gavras’s Mad City get it wrong that the suspicious-minded might be tempted to think that…