Badlands (1973)

An enjoyable account of Charles Dickens’s love affair with a much younger woman whose historicity, however, must remain largely speculative

Kiss the Girls, directed by Gary Fleder to a screenplay by David Klass (based on the novel by James Patterson), begins with a voiceover narration, obviously by a scary sex-criminal, saying: “You want to know all about me. . .” Well, no, as a matter of fact I don’t. Why should he assume that I…

Another exercise in politically progressive moral earnestness by John Sayles sinks under its own weight of good intentions.

Here are the good things about Traffic, Steven Soderbergh’s new and ambitious — and, indeed, epic-scale movie treatment of what is still here and there called the “drug war.” It does not glamorize drug taking, or drug supplying, though about a third of it deals with the first and about two- thirds with the second. Nor does it…

[See “Entry from July 1, 2009” under “My Diary”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Let’s stipulate that teenage sexual energy and the sorts of things it drives the young’uns to get up to are inherently funny subjects. Shakespeare has the grumbling old shepherd in The Winter’s Tale say: “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is…