Godfrey Cheshire

As the movie opens, a hand-lettered book of fairy tales unfolds and a narrator’s voice begins to intone the story that we see splayed out, in words and pictures, across the luminous parchment. It’s a familiar tale of knighthood, castles and damsels in distress, and it lasts, oh, about 15 seconds, until suddenly–RRRIIIPPPP. The last […]

Recently I saw the Broadway revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, starring Juliette Binoche and Liev Schreiber, and it gave new impetus to a question that has been on my mind since I saw the play’s 1983 celluloid version: Why don’t more movies (and plays) tell their stories backward? The only other reverse narrative I can […]

Im Kwon Taek’s Chunhyang is a lush, visually arresting costume drama set in 18th- century Korea. One of the rare Korean films distributed in this country, it has a romantic story that will remind some viewers of Romeo and Juliet, and a sweeping grandeur that recalls Akira Kurosawa epics like Kagemusha and Ran. With just […]

Nearly 40 years ago, the literary creations of two former British spies collectively spawned the movies’ modern secret agent–a character born, not surprisingly, with a split identity. Granted, there was never much commercial equivalence between Ian Fleming’s James Bond, an earnings dynamo with few equals, and the various, less-glamorous operatives imagined by the pseudonymous John […]

I went into Enemy at the Gates not knowing much about it other than that the ads made it look like a sprawling World War II epic and carried a quote (from one of those faux-critics known in the business as “blurb whores”) likening it to a cross between Saving Private Ryan and High Noon. […]

“A diversion before death” is how a character who stands in for Ingmar Bergman describes Faithless, a new film written by Bergman and directed by one his erstwhile stars, Liv Ullmann. On the face of it, the description is a bit cryptic. It could refer to a work suffused with maudlin self-pity. It might be […]

“Well, I’ve got plenty of films for the bottom half of the list.” That was my standard response when friends started asking me about this year’s edition of the annual 10-best ritual. A decent year for really good films, but a lame one for flat-out masterpieces, 2000, coming after the much stronger 1999, proved the […]

Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away transpires in three sections that are wildly different from each other in purpose, tone and quality. The first, which introduces Tom Hanks as a troubleshooting, globetrotting FedEx executive, then sends him airborne into a storm that leaves him stranded on a tropical island, is as functional but unremarkable as such expository […]

The holiday movie season arrives this week like an avalanche. As always, the sudden abundance means a daunting array of choices for those lucky souls with the time for movie-going. But for the critic, the task of providing recommendations is unusually easy for once. The two best movies opening this weekend will play local art […]