One of the most hotly debated American films of the 1950s, High Noon is widely regarded as scenarist Carl Foreman’s subversive assault on McCarthyism. (His script is based on John W. Cunningham’s story “The Tin Star.”) But there are problems with this interpretation of the film as a “morality play” with contemporary relevance. Indeed, the […]

Barry Levinson’s Rain Man belongs to a genre of movies I love: the “road picture.” In these films, partly derived from medieval literature (such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s unfinished The Canterbury Tales, from the late fourteenth century), one or more characters journey, by foot or by vehicle, through a physical landscape that acts as correlative to […]

Trimmed of the profanity and excessive violence that got it an “R” rating, the network version of Proof of Life is probably the best one around. It’s what I saw, and the assurance in the credits that it was all “inspired” by an article (by William Prochnau) and a book (by Thomas Hargrove) seems like […]

For me, it has been a given that Christopher Nolan is a terrible filmmaker. Any list I might compile of the 25 worst films ever made would include two of his, Memento (2000) and Insomnia (2002). In both these films Nolan is soulless, afflicted by an utter disregard for the human condition. Batman Begins, the […]

The title of Steven Spielberg’s film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence echoes that of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, an hysterical fable fueled by his penchant for seducing members of audiences to yield their individuality in favor of realizing a truer identity through a group, the audience they are part of—a crowd this director seeks to control. Spielberg has […]