Badlands (1973)

The movies have in the past found it profitable to cater for almost every kind of paranoia there is. The California fantasy factories must be getting a lot of business out of even the survivalist types—who, you would think, must live many miles from the nearest Multiplex—since they managed to get some black helicopters into…

Let me get this straight. We’re supposed to sympathize with this guy for wanting to blow himself up along with a bunch of people he doesn’t even know?

Post Coitum Animal Triste, directed by Brigitte Roüen, stars Miss Roüen herself as Diane, a publisher married to the decent but boring lawyer, Philippe (Patrick Chesnais). She suddenly falls passionately in love with the much younger Emilio (Boris Terral) — a hydraulic engineer who goes about doing good, bringing water to the third world. What…

Are Americans getting to be the good guys in the movies once again? Well, maybe not altogether so.

Trust Merchant-Ivory to find a way to transform the elegant and the sophisticated into the banal

At a certain age, almost everyone is inclined to see his mother as a suffering saint and his father as a bully and a tyrant. It is a part of the process of growing up and corresponds with a youth’s period of greatest need to declare independence him- or herself from the paternal tie. It…