I really wanted to like The Matador. And I guess I did…technically. I was hoping for something that it wasn’t–a sort of Leon: The Professional meets Gross Point Blank. It was more, well, it was its own thing…an original. And that’s admirable, come to think of it. If I should level criticism anywhere, perhaps it […]

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“The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.” It’s the sort of book many of us own and hope others see on the bookshelf when they come over for dinner. Which is to say, none of us have ever read “Tristram Shandy” but we hold on to it because we keep telling ourselves that one […]

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In Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning masterpiece, Shindler’s List, Liam Neeson shares a dance with his estranged wife in a posh club. Last she saw him, he was a struggling business man. Now he is wealthy beyond either of their wildest dreams. How, she wonders, did he amass this wealth.
“There’s no way I could have known this […]

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I cannot watch The New World without weeping.
This film speaks to me as few films can. It manages to push its way past all of my barriers and lodge in a heart that is more receptive to its messages than I ever dreamed. So rapturous is its beauty, so lyrical is its direction, so convincing […]

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Just when you were about to give up on Woody Allen, he reinvents himself with a taut tour de force of a film that is unquestionably the best thing he’s done in decades.

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In 1994, Steven Spielberg came out with two of the biggest movies of the year—one fun and forgettable and the other, devastating and eternal—Jurassic Park and Shindler’s List. Just over a decade later, in 2005, he did the same thing, giving us the uninspired and silly War of the Worlds and later, the powerful and […]

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