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Decades ago Robert Bresson turned a great novel by Georges Bernanos---Diary of a Country Priest---into a great film (1950). Is there suffering in the priestly life?  There can be, yes---plenty of it---and there is for the country padre (Claude Laydu) in this work. ...

To me, Mean Girls (2004), which is ten years old this year, contains too much plot, but that's not much of a fault.  What's more, the third time I saw it I thought the jokes were inadequately paced, but with a fourth viewing I realized they actually aren't.  So Tina...

Crazed Fruit is a Japanese film about young people living in Japan at the time the picture was made: the mid-1950s. Predictably, the kids here distrust their elders and are cynical about their country.  Rather than being instruments of the change they think there...

The notorious French film about two overgrown boys, worthless, who would rather steal than work and whose toys are women, Going Places (1974) has something to say about the spiritual and emotional  malnourishment whose results are degradation and drift.  But in...

Jack Bauer is back---because the Fox program, 24, is back---still hard to take but meaning well. The first of twelve 2014 episodes is set in London, where Chloe is virtually hanging out with the Clockwork Orange bunch and, withal, must be rescued from torture by...

In the 1946 Hitchcock picture, Notorious, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is a woman of scandalous character whose German father gets his comeuppance for treason.  Then she is recruited by the U.S. government agent (Cary Grant) who will fall in love with her for the...

For all his talent, Anthony Hopkins's---and Oliver Stone's---Richard Nixon in 1996's Nixon is simply weird, naught but a man with his demons.  The film itself has its stylistic demons to boot, what with all its flashiness and now-color, now-monochrome silliness.  Yes,...

In the William Wyler film version of Wuthering Heights (1939), starring Laurence Olivier, gone is the slow working out of Heathcliff's ugly revenge and his final casting-off of it.  Gone is the focus on death following error and disillusionment.  Gone are the...

During surgery for a ruptured appendix, young Colton Burpo reportedly had a near-death experience.  He maintains that he went to Heaven and, according to his preacher father Tod, there are things that strongly corroborate the report.  And even confirm it:  e.g.,...