King’s Row (1942)

A gripping account of the capture of FBI mole Robert Hanssen which is just the teensiest bit hazy on why he wanted capturing

[See “Conventional Cuts,” The American Spectator of December, 2006-January, 2007, under “Articles”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

The Hi Lo Country, based on a novel by Max Evans published in 1961, has a weird period flavor to it even though, as directed by Stephen Frears, it is also very much of the nineties. You can see in it elements of Hemingway’s austere sensualism and bedrock conviction that literary art mainly consists of…

The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have always had something of the smart aleck about them. Even such wonderful movies as Miller’s Crossing and Fargo teetered on the brink of becoming mere smart aleck movies like Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy. What saved them in their better movies was a sense of moral seriousness…

Another immensely watchable film from Iran, in spite a slight tendency to promote civic responsibility

The Harmonists, directed by Joseph Vilsmaier, is the “based-on-a-true story” story of The Comedian Harmonists, an immensely popular singing group in pre-war Germany that eventually had to break up, as three of its six members were Jewish. Like nearly every other film set in its time and place, this one is ultimately sucked into the…