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So much has been written about Orson Welles in the last twenty years that it almost feels as though he were a character created by Scott Fitzgerald, a wonderful idea of something worth aspiring to in an attempt to explain a lost moment of time when the United States still felt new. [...]

Don’t let the fancy-sounding English accents fool you. Harry Brown is a vigilante flick, pure and simple, a bleak and bloody blending of Death Wish and Gran Torino starring Michael Caine that just happens to be set in England.
Caine plays an ex-serviceman living in a South London neighborhood where gangs of drug-pushing punks [...]

It’s grim up North.
This, in a nutshell, is the philosophy of novelist David Peace, a native of Yorkshire in England, whose series of books about crime and corruption are the base for this excellent trilogy, originally broadcast on the BBC. Peace is a progenitor of pulp, and obvious student of American [...]

Andy Garcia plays an Italian-American prison guard from the Bronx, who yearns to be an actor in the mode of Marlon Brando, in this charming little movie that grew on me as it evolved to its satisfying ending. City Island played for a long, long run at the Chez Artiste in Denver, and I [...]

As a movie, The Square, a low-budget Australian thriller produced sometime in 2008, is far less energetic than its DVD preview would have you believe, but is saved by a first-rate script that renders it reminiscent of the best noir flicks.

Temple Grandin. Now there’s a name that was ready-built for fame and consequence. It’s a name that may only now be entering household use, but Grandin’s influence, both as a professional and as an example to others, has had a significant impact for decades, in this country and elsewhere. Few [...]

The City of Your Final Destination is the first Merchant-Ivory film to be produced after the death of producer Ismail Merchant. As directed by the now 82-year-old James Ivory, City is an actor’s showcase, nominally about a young man attempting to write an authorized biography of a deceased South American writer.

A lot more could have been done with the premise upon which The Joneses is built. The idea is clever and original: a sleeper cell of marketeers posing as an ideal nuclear family moves into an upscale suburban neighborhood. Their mission: to act as seductive models of materialist perfection, subtly provoking their [...]

Triage is a solid if unspectacular war-photographer drama á la Under Fire or Salvador that, while not nearly as energetic as those films, contains some solid performances from a cast including Colin Farrell, Paz Vega and 86-year-old Christopher Lee.
Based on a book by war correspondent Scott Anderson, it’s set in 1988 and shows [...]

Goodness, the British certainly do hate Tony Blair…
But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
There have been any number of political thrillers released in the last few years, the culmination of the ‘lost years’ of America, where the Bush administration, and its allies in England, have come in for a right kicking over [...]