Anyone who may still be treasuring fond memories of the 1950s has got to have a hard time of it in coming up against the tendency of late 20th century culture—which seems to be obsessed with the notion that that decade was a horrible time in America’s history. Well, you may think as I do…
Career Girls provides evidence that Mike Leigh has been spoiled by success. Or by something. Anyway, he is spoiled. Perhaps it is because he has mellowed politically. This film only has one gratuitous swipe at Margaret Thatcher, and even that seems half-hearted at best. He was better when he was a fulminating leftie. At least…
Mrs Brown written by Jeremy Brock, directed by John Madden and starring Judi Dench as Queen Victoria and Billy Connolly as her servant, John Brown, is a Masterpiece Theatre costume drama, based fairly faithfully on true events, which has found its way onto the big screen and manages, in spite of all expectations, not to…
Guantanamera is, I guess, a sort of Cuban communist version of such US movies as One Fine Day or that one with Nicholas Cage and Bridget Fonda about the cop who wins the lottery ( “We’re in the money” ? “Can’t buy me love” ? I can’t remember). In other words, it borrows the name…
Who lives by the plot shall die by the plot. Copland, written and directed by James Mangold, is an old-fashioned, plot-driven, realistic thriller that almost succeeds but that falls down because of a central incoherence in the plot. The problem is this. Everything depends on the far reaching ramifications of what happens one night to…
Love Serenade, an Australian film by Shirley Barrett stars George Shevtsov as Ken Sherry, a recently divorced (for the third time) disc jockey from Brisbane who comes to work in the little Australian town of Sunray on the Murray River. Next door to him live two young sisters, Vicki Ann (Rebecca Frith) and Dimity (Miranda…
Conspiracy Theory, written by Brian Helgeland and directed by Richard Donner, attempts to do for lunatics what movies like The Shawshank Redemption tried to do for convicts—that is to sanitize them and make them lovable victims of government and society instead of dangerous social malcontents. Charming, blue-eyed Mel Gibson plays Jerry, a middle aged New…
Shall We Dance? by Masayuki Suo is a Japanese film with all the charm and delicacy of the best French movies. It surprises and delights with the subtlety of its observation and the skill of its construction, and it moved me deeply at several points. Koji Yakusyo stars as Mr Sugiyama, a rumpled and tired-…
The End of Violence, directed by Wim Wenders and written by Nicholas Klein is a frequently enjoyable film in which, however, there is far too much going on, an excess of Germanic portentousness and a hackneyed narrative premiss involving a vast governmental conspiracy (ho-hum) against the people. On the symbolic level the film is about…
Picture Perfect, directed by Glenn Gordon Caron, is a nicely crafted picture calculated to warm whatever organ it is that serves advertising executives in the office of a heart. Jennifer Aniston stars as Kate, a young and ambitious specimen of that breed whose hopes of love seem to rise no higher than bedding, in a…
Air Force One by Wolfgang Petersen is a superior example of its kind, the disaster movie cum thriller featuring national security and political issues of a kind that Hollywood invariably gets wrong. This film is no exception. It posits a warlord ruler of Kazakhstan who threatens world peace by turning his desperately poor country into…
A Smile Like Yours, directed by Keith Samples (co-written by Samples and Kevin Meyer), starts off as a kind of throwback to those 1950s comedies in which a lovable ditz of a wife went around getting into trouble which her steady, long-suffering straight-man of a husband would then have to get her out of. George…
