Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942)

Whatever It Takes, directed by David Raynr and written by Mark Schwahn is yet another in the seemingly endless stream of movies which attempt to translate classic literature into American High School stories. This fad began in 1995 with what is still the best of its kind, Amy Heckerling’s adaptation of Emma, by Jane Austen,…

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

Four Days in September by the Brazilian director Bruno Barreto has about it the sepia tones of an old photograph. How strange people were in those far off days of 1969, and what strange things they did. Much credit is due to Barreto, himself a former leftist, for the skill and artistic restraint involved in…

Who’d have thought it? It seems that somewhere in Hollywood’s parallel universe the Sharks and the Jets are still rumbling.

In The Hurricane, Norman Jewison is going through the motions. His film takes an ostensibly true story which also conforms to a classic movie situation—a man condemned for a crime he did not commit—and allows our expectations to do all the work. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington) was a top middleweight contender in the mid-1960s…

Dancing at Lughnasa, written by Frank McGuinness from play by Brian Friel and directed by Pat O’Connor, stars Marvelous Meryl Streep doing a vowel-perfect Irish accent as Kate Mundy, a severe old maid and schoolmistress who is trying to hold together her little family in Ireland in the 1930s. The family consists of her four…