King’s Row (1942)

Devil’s Island, directed by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson and written by Einar Karason is set in the 1950s in a former American army base in Iceland called Camp Thule. Into the army’s wartime Quonset huts there have now moved a collection of poor Icelanders who can afford no better place to live and who are looked…

Un Air de Famille, directed by Cédric Klapisch (While the Cat’s Away) from an original play by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, is enormous fun, and I highly recommend it if you are lucky enough to find it opening in your neighborhood. Denis (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is having affair with Betty (Miss Jaoui) while working for…

A notorious and notoriously disgusting bit of cinema which, nevertheless, has a bit more to it than the rest of Lars von Trier’s films

It would be presumptuous of me to review Return With Honor, a documentary directed by Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders, who also co-wrote it with Christine Z. Wiser. Both the writing and the direction are quite unobtrusive, and the picture consists almost entirely of interviews with American prisoners of war, most of them Navy…

Like The Damned United, this is another British film which derives its oomph from a (mostly) successful attempt to recapture the way things were decades ago — and persuading us that it matters

Simon Birch, written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson with a “suggested by” credit to John Irving for A Prayer for Owen Meany, is one of those self-consciously uplifting films, like The Spitfire Grill or Fried Green Tomatoes, that leave one feeling manipulated and disgusted. Like them it has been conceived and designed and put…