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Indisputably, people don't know why they exist.  Are they in hell?  IS there a hell?  Edmond, the anti-hero in Stuart Gordon's film Edmond, would like to know.  Really, it is David Mamet's film too; he authored the script and Edmond is the 2005 screen version of his...

In 1969, the year of True Grit's release, critic Stanley Kauffmann found the movie offputtingly conservative.  Mattie, the Kim Darby character, keeps mentioning that her family owns property, you see. Whatever.  It isn't offputting to me.  I enjoyed it for showing us...

The 1975 film, Smile, directed by Michael Ritchie and written by Jerry Belsen, is a morally searching comedy about a California teenage beauty pageant drenched in insincerity.  Contest officials include extroverted Brenda (Barbara Feldon) and mobile-home salesman Big...

In The Diary of a Country Priest, the 1936 Georges Bernanos novel, the essentially unreligious (who may be laymen) sin and the young priest suffers.  Cancer becomes his principal burden, and, although the priest finally dies, he is the one who comes out on top, as, to...

"Diary of a Country Priest" (the novel)

Sets, costumes and cinematography are all worthy of the likable job Gillian Armstrong did on the '94 version of Little Women, a U.S. production with Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder.  The film is a sweet, vigorous semi-fairy tale divorced neither from a certain...

The premise for the George Stevens comedy, Vivacious Lady (1938), is that a botany professor (James Stewart) hastily marries an amiable nightclub performer (Ginger Rogers), but runs into sundry difficulties in trying to inform his father about it.  The scenario is by...

Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) concerns the busting-up of foolish dreams in a country of runaway commercialism and fading respectable culture.  (Why, there's even troilism in the culture now, leading to fatal sexual jealousy!)  It also presents the...