When you watch a porn film, you enter an alternative universe where it’s completely normal for everyone to have sex with everyone else all the time. They look like real people, but they’re not.  When you watch The Anniversary Party, you enter an alternative world where eve

A Beautiful Mind is one of those small dramas that we used to pejoratively refer to as a tv movie. We can’t do that anymore because the best drama written today, by far, is found on tv.  This film has some wonderful moments. My favorites are when the hero, Nash, figures out his

Altman’s latest foray into horizontal storytelling succeeds mostly in showing the limits of this approach.  Horizontal storytelling is the result of increasing the number of major characters and emphasizing simultaneous action over sequential action.  The primary advantages of h

This film doesn’t work for a number of reasons. Let me focus on two.  Every story starts with the problem/need of the hero. But this one is ridiculous. In the first ten minutes of this film, a strange woman named Petal jumps into the hero’s car at a gas station. The hero,

Clearly the British are learning from Hollywood. Billy Elliot is the BBC version of Rocky, with a few elements from Flashdance andHow Green Was My Valley thrown in as well. I kept waiting for the kid to open his arms wide and sing, “Gotta dance!”  But if this is formula mo

Cast Away is one of those high-concept movies that gives you the shell of drama but not the content. This isn’t a fantasy, but it might as well have been. A man who is constantly on the run gets marooned on a desert island for four years. Besides losing a lot of weight, he suppo

The first lesson of this film is: Make it authentic. If you are going behind the scenes, you better be right. Not here. A Republican wants to try to hold up a vice presidential nomination. No one would care. The President nominates someone who switched from Republican to Democrat. Wou

This is one of the stranger movies in some time. I know the tradition of young boys coming of age with beautiful women is a hallowed one in Italy, but this film pushes the envelope. A gorgeous woman spends the entire movie walking back and forth in the town square while a young teen-a

It was the ultimate challenge for a defender of free speech to take on the case of the Marquis de Sade. Unfortunately the constructuon of this story is so wrong-headed that I kept wishing someone would put a gag in the Marquis’ mouth. We have a hero who just has to write, even u

Kenneth Lonergan’s film shows us the difference between drama and melodrama. Because we see true drama so rarely it is a surprise when it comes along. What is called drama in Hollywood is almost always melodrama. Melodrama is about going big: the shocking reveal, resorting to th