Maybe I’m getting too old to take a continual exposure to our morally radioactive popular culture. The experience of watching Whipped, written and directed by Peter M. Cohen, produced on me the same effect that the sight of Poor Tom o’Bedlam had on the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear: “I’th’ last night’s storm I…
The comic insight at the heart of Jay Roach’s Meet the Parents lies in establishing the nexus between humorlessness, paranoia and sentimentality in Robert De Niro’s portrayal of every bachelor’s nightmare of the father of his intended. The late Adolf Hitler, I believe, had the same three qualities, though this is not a comparison in…
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…
Aiming for the Like Water for Chocolate niche in the market, Woman on Top is advertised as a movie about sex and cooking — which at least must be said to beat sex and shopping. Insofar as it is actually about anything, however, it is more about magic. And not very interesting magic. The magic,…
The Way of the Gun, a movie written and directed for critics by Christopher McQuarrie — who won an Oscar for the screenplay of that other critics’ movie, The Usual Suspects — begins and ends with a voiceover narration by one of the two stars, Ryan Phillippe, purporting to debunk the idea of a natural…
Alice et Martin, directed and co-written by André Techiné, is an unconventional romance of a type that the French are so good at, but it is also a complex psychological drama which, I think, loses itself in its own complexities. At the level of the cinematic or dramatic detail it is a fine film. The…
It’s almost unbelievable that at this distance of time someone could make a movie about Abbie Hoffman which is utterly without any sense of irony about or detachment from the eccentric views of the late Yippie leader. They used to say about the Bourbons that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, but Louis XVIII…
Nurse Betty, the new film by Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors), is wonderfully enjoyable all the way through until its last ten minutes when suddenly the wild and thrilling ride it has offered us comes to a dead end. The story concerns Betty (Renée Zellweger), a small-town waitress from…
The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, is worth seeing in the limited sense in which many inferior documentaries are worth seeing—that is, as a document of cultural or sociological interest. I confess to a further enjoyment of the campy set-up—including narration by RuPaul Charles and little Shari Lewis-style…
The wildly over-rated Dancer in the Dark by Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves) seems to me simply the most silly and pretentious load of tripe that I have seen in many a long day. So silly is it that, but for remembering a similar but less obtrusive kind of silliness to be found in…
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…
A great fan of Taste of Cherry, the last film by the Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, I went to his newest, The Wind Will Carry Us with high hopes. I was not disappointed. It is an even better, more engaging and interesting, work than the other, but is recognizably by the same man. In particular,…
