It was the best of films, it was the worst of films. Darkly atmospheric, sparked by Ronald Colman’s wry, charming, poignant performance—his most brilliant and affecting one—as Sydney Carton, an alcoholic barrister whose disillusionment is compounded by the aching pain of unrequited love, and admitting at least two passages that deeply move: Jack Conway and […]

Arnaud Desplechin’s unnerving The Sentinel has about it the troubled, ambiguous air of Hamlet, elements of which it relocates and reorders. A boy, raised in Germany where his French diplomat father has just died, is off to university in Paris to study forensic medicine. (He is told, “You take care of the dead.”) What debt […]