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I am inspired by the success of The Artist to write about an even better silent film--1927's It. The title refers not to a sci-fi creature but to that dazzling human quality which entices members of the opposite sex, and herein Clara Bow enacts (outstandingly) a...

A mostly silent film made in black and white, The Artist (2011) is a novelty piece which ought to have had a better plot.  Its value lies in its details and its cast (Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo are as self-assured and winning as it is possible to be).  There is...

Since I am displeased with the review I wrote for the 2008 French film, The Class (or Entre les Murs), I wish to supplant it with the following: During the Aughts, Laurence Cantet adapted a French novel titled Entre les Murs for the screen.  Called in the United...

Obviously there are severe limitations in the Paranormal Activity-videocam mode of moviemaking, and I wish never to see a picture made in this mode again.  In Chronicle (2012), however, for all the severe limitations, it's fairly free of hokiness. Written by Max...

I decided to watch I Know Who Killed Me (2007) on DVD because a critic, Jim Ridley, at the Village Voice liked it and opined that moviegoers shouldn't have overlooked it.  He's nearly right.  For over an hour this horror film by Scott Sivertson, starring Lindsay...

The heroes of Western novels sure have a lot of problems.  Martin Kelso, for example, is buried in difficulties and turmoil in Lewis B. Patten's The Tarnished Star (1963), another sapid oater by the author of A Killing in Kiowa. But . . . no problems, no drama.  Once...

The French director Robert Bresson, whose 13 films are currently being shown in a New York City retrospective, was a Christian artist without being a Christian man, i.e. a bona fide Christian believer.  His cinematic style usually leaves me cold, although not in two...

On Little Children (2007): Kate Winslet is commanding but never hammy.  All the anxiety, ambivalence, femininity, and intelligence of the character of Sarah in this Todd Field movie Winslet supplies.  She's the best thing in it.  An adaptation of a Tom Perrotta novel...

Hollywood is woefully indifferent to the scripts it puts together for its action flicks (those scoundrels!), and so the one created for Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) doesn't exactly tell a high-quality story.  But it's such a wonderfully rich B-feature I...