King’s Row (1942)

Ready to Rumble, directed by Brian Robbins and written by Steven Brill, might have been called “Dumb and Dumber Go to the Mat.” Its ostensible look behind the scenes at professional wrestling could have followed the trail blazed by the excellent Beyond the Mat, reviewed here last month. Instead the movie settles for repeated attempts…

A silly attempt to re-imagine Jane Austen as a romance novelist of our own time inexplicably marooned in the 18^th century

First the good news about Along Came Polly, written and directed by John Hamburg. In parts it is very funny. True, a lot of the humor depends on thunderous borborygmus and torrential bodily extromissions, which may seem simply gross to those of finer sensitivities. Presumably Mr. Hamburg, who co-wrote the screenplay of that earlier and…

Having once lived in the area served by Channel 6 (Harrisburg, York, Lancaster, Lebanon), where Russ Richards (John Travolta) works as celebrity weather man in Nora Ephron’s amusing Lucky Numbers, I can assure you that not everybody in Central Pennsylvania is a moron. Nor would anyone but a supercilious Hollywood type suppose that “Harrisburg’s most…

Yet another moral tale to illustrate how much is to be deplored by all right-thinking people the “cycle of violence”

Faust — as he appears in Playing God and Devil’s Advocate — appears to be all the rage in Hollywood at the moment. Coincidently, a Norwegian version of the Faust tale in Jan Troell’s Hamsun is knocking around out there somewhere at the moment. You may even get to see it if you live in…