Breaking Away (1979)

In Anaconda, Danny (Ice Cube), while he is being pursued up the Amazon by a gigantic, man-eating snake and a homocidal river man, dreams of being back in “civilization” — by which he means “on the L.A. freeways with my cell phone.” Ha! If you’ve got to choose between the giant snake and the river…

The Object of My Affection, directed by Nicholas Hytner from a screenplay by Wendy Wasserstein, strives briefly to rise above the level of moral imbecility we have come to expect from most Hollywood comedies these days, but alas does not succeed. The idea is that Nina Borowski (Jennifer Aniston), a young social worker in New…

A very watchable version of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel that is better than its authors’ recent form but still not so good as the first movie version

A Friend of the Deceased (Un Ami du Défunt), a Franco-Ukrainian film directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich and written—in Russian—by Andrei Kourkov, has a very attractive premiss. Tolia (Alexandre Lazarev), a translator living in Kiev and living a hand-to-mouth, hustling sort of existence not untypical of life in the former Soviet Union, finds that his rather…

You know you’re in trouble with a movie that begins as the camera pans over the spines of a pile of highbrow books. Look at all those impressive authors’ names! Kierkegaard, Chekhov, Joyce, the Marquis de Sade. The selection is as telling (and is meant to be) as the books themselves about what it is…

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, directed by Mark Jonathan Harris and narrated by Dame Judi Dench, manages the trick (as not all Holocaust documentaries do) of conveying strong emotion on the part of its subjects without ever seeming to exploit it or them. It tells the story of the 10,000 Jewish…