For me this movie was a good history lesson about Queen Victoria and the labor and tory parties, with some really good performances.

A bitter tale of the devastating effects French Catholic missionaries had on the Algonquin and Huron tribes along the St. Lawrence river. Beautiful scenery is the only respite in a spiteful, if accurate, story.

I had no idea what I was in for with this movie. It starts with a true story that took place in Brooklyn in 1972, and proceeds to hit you from all directions with the oddities of human behavior. Economic hardship, the influence of mass media, gay marriage, mob psychology, hostage psychology, transgender operations, geographic…

This movie compares mental illness and drug addiction to love, and has fun doing it. I wouldn’t usually root for a violent, thieving stalker as a hero, but what if such tactics are the only ones that would ever get through to the self-loathing, drug-addicted object of his obsession? The dangerous presumption is that his…

I thought this was a refreshing, satirical break from the “crime movie” genre. The characters and the setup are ridiculous on one level, and very real on another. It’s light entertainment that, if you think about it, asks difficult questions about the nature of crime, justice, mental illness, love, friendsip, and cultural clashes.

This movie has only gotten better, and maybe more disturbing, since it was released in 1989. Since then Columbine and other high school killings have made this kind of satire even more taboo. And it is unnerving to wonder if the perpetrators of those attrocities found inspiration in the trenchcoat-clad Christian Slater character. Still, the…

This was my second time around for this movie, Ann’s first. I think I liked it better this time. The Cohen brothers are just amazing at creating ludicrous, unreedeming, even annoying characters that are somehow facinating anyway – maybe because of the way they reflect truths from our world in such a dazzling, kaleidoscopic way.

My old friend Roy Boswell kindly sent a batch of movie recommendations for me. A few of them are reviewed here too. Roy got rejected by my spam software – if this is happening to you please send me an email! I’m trying to find good settings for it. Read on for Roy’s reviews…

Ann summed it up nicely the moment the movie ended, “So she fell out the bottom of one caste system into the top of another.” This film is based on the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, and like some of the movies based on Jane Austen and E.M. Forster books it left me grateful that…

For a low budget Western, this film manages to convey something unique. A lot of films have tried to capture the harsh beauty of the desert Southwest, the indominable spirit of wild horses, and unavoidable cruelty of wild west society, but this movie succeeds at these things in a way that manages to be captivating…