Dirty Work

A dud tragedy with a prize-catching but bogus moral about what it would doubtless describe as American “capitalism” — but with lots to watch for you film buffs

Agnès Jaoui’s terrrific new movie, Look at Me, begins in a taxicab as the passenger (Marilou Berry), attempts to get the surly driver (Jean-Pierre Lazzerini) to turn down the radio so that she can hear what someone is saying to her on her mobile phone. When her father (Jean-Pierre Bacri) gets into the cab, he…

The X-Files, directed by Rob Bowman (no relation) and written by the series’s creator, Chris Carter, gives us an example of the perfect post-modern movie, because it presents to us a non-functional conspiracy. That is to say, the conspiracy is detached from its objective, or else the objective is so obscure that it remains unclear…

Iris Murdoch? Oh, yeah. She was that writer who got Alzheimer’s, wasn’t she?

Once again, Clint Eastwood reaches after profundity and compassion but can grasp only conventional emotions and beliefs

The re-release of Jules Dassin’s Rififi (French title: Du Rififi Chez les Hommes) of 1954 comes opportunely to remind the Hollywood epigoni known to these pages as the Taranteenies of what film noir really was. The chief difference between it and that which too often, and too erroneously, goes under the same name today, is…