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Auggie Wren, a smoke shop owner; Paul Benjamin, a novelist; Rashid, a black teenage boy; Cyrus Cole, a one-armed black filling station owner; Ruby, Auggie's one-eyed former girlfriend---these make up much of the dramatis personae of the intelligent and absorbing 1995...

Rene Clement's Forbidden Games (1952) is the classic French picture which centers on two youngsters living in rural France in 1940 as German planes invade the air space and drop bombs on various sites in the country. When death pervades in the sphere of children is...

I believe Woody Allen is a damaged man and that 1979's Manhattan is damaged goods.  That 42-year-old Isaac (Allen) will wait six months for teenaged Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) to return from London without hooking up with another woman, and that Tracy, however...

There are a great many problems with the script by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, thus making The Godfather Part II (1974) a near-flop.  Yet it is watchable, I think, because it is powerful.  In this it resembles Hitchcock's films, and like Hitchcock, Coppola...

Don Siegel got a bit fancy in his directing of the 1971 film, The Beguiled, and that the look is occasionally unpolished is not so bad.  All the same, the film is built on a premise which I must regard as poor:  during the Civil War, the female proprietor of a...

Kudos to Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond for an engaging if imperfect screenplay for The Apartment (1960), which was also, by Wilder, exquisitely directed.  Consider that nothing is under- or overemphasized. . . The film shows us a tug-of-war between the overturning...

I was very hard last year on Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) but, believing it just might be a well-made guilty pleasure (if not something better), I decided to give it another chance. I was naive---except that the first ten minutes of the...

Not bad but not all that good either, I'll See You In My Dreams (2015) focuses on a widow and retired teacher, Carol Petersen (Blythe Danner).  A new film by Brett Haley, it presents the Unexpected, in various forms, intruding into the life of an aging person, but...

In 2004's Man on the Train, Jean Rochefort plays Manesquier, a bachelor who offers lodging to, and befriends, a middle-aged bank robber named Milan (Johnny Hallyday).  Friendless and lonely, Manesquier finds himself secretly longing for the kind of gutsiness and...