On Moonlight Bay (1951)

Like David Lynch in The Straight Story, Mike Leigh apparently thought it was time to surprise us with Topsy-Turvy. Instead of his usual dark and sardonic and implicitly political look at present- day Britain, he offers us an ostensibly sunny period-piece about, of all things, the collaboration of W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and Sir Arthur…

A good-hearted Australian movie that just about rises to the level of being worth watching

The thesis of Elizabeth, written by Michael Hirst and directed by Shekhar Kapur, is very simple— like the people that the thesis is ultimately about. These are the credulous peasants of the middle ages who are supposed to have worshiped the Virgin Mary. By the 16th century, the Catholic Church as headed by Sir John…

The Dinner Game, as the untranslatable Dîner de Cons is awkwardly but decorously rendered, is an uproarious French farce by Francis Veber, co-author of La Cage Aux Folles and creator on his own of a number of other plays and films in a similar style. It tells the story of Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte), a…

The gentle humor of this coming-of-age story is perhaps just a touch too gentle.

Yet another exercise in Bush-bashing from the Hollywood propaganda machine