Dirty Work

The American distributors who refused an American market to Adrian Lyne’s new film version of Lolita until it was already booked for its first run on Showtime, the cable network (beginning on August 2), said that they did so on the grounds that the film was no good. Of course, these are the same people…

I’m not quite sure how it does it, but the Australian film, The Dish, directed by Rob Sitch, gives the best cinematic account known to me of the American space program. On the surface, it is only tangentially about the Apollo 11 moonshot in July, 1969. Instead it concentrates on the true story of the…

In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai is a beautiful film. In fact, it is a film that the word “beautiful,” as applied to the movies, could have been invented to describe. It helps, of course, that the two principal players are Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, both extraordinarily good-looking people, and that the…

Simon Birch, written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson with a “suggested by” credit to John Irving for A Prayer for Owen Meany, is one of those self-consciously uplifting films, like The Spitfire Grill or Fried Green Tomatoes, that leave one feeling manipulated and disgusted. Like them it has been conceived and designed and put…

I hope it will not sound too relativistic of me to say that each age has its own moral needs. In the late Victorian era people needed to hear—though not nearly so much as they might have needed to hear a few years earlier or later—that mercy and forgiveness and forbearance to sinners was holy…

Tommy Lee Jones is hunting in the woods for a chicken-loving, people-hating serial killer that — gasp! — he trained. What’s not to like? Read on.