On Moonlight Bay (1951)

Sensitive young men who feel betrayed by their heroic but unfeeling fathers (and mothers) have so been done to death, yet we never seem to tire of them

A movie that tries harder than we might have expected to create a plausible dramatic framework for its story of Dark Age love and death but which can’t get over its psycho-therapeutic sappiness

A brilliantly conceived and executed Argentinian “sting” is only bettered by the movie that describes it.

SLC Punk is another teen movie, but one with a serious purpose that is not lost sight of in the first five minutes. Obviously based on the personal experience of the writer-director James Merendino, it presents us with the inherently comic picture of a post-high school punk rocker, called Stevo (Matthew Lillard), and the not…

The idea of a ghost who comes back from the dead to haunt his murderer is probably as old as murder itself and is familiar to us from the famous scene in Macbeth where Banquo’s ghost appears at the feast. But the idea of a ghost who appears not as a decorous classical shade, a…

My first thought about The Waterboy, directed by Frank Coraci, was that I had already seen just about as many movies as I would ever need to see in which Adam Sandler attempts to exploit his arrested development for comic purposes. But then the Washington Post ran a “Style” section piece by Sharon Waxman taking…