What’s wrong with The Da Vinci Code can be summed up in one word: everything!
Catholics scream “Heresy!” Methodists yawn. Jews roll their eyes and pass the matzo. And assorted monks, nuns, priests and albinos threaten boycotts on behalf of everyone else. Meanwhile, there’s a much more important reason to avoid this noisy and ludicrous Read More
I saw The DaVinci Code last night with a friend, a lapsed Catholic, after two other friends, also lapsed Catholics, raved about it. Even a lapsed Jew like me knows that this movie will be poison at the confession box. It’s like the idea I discovered in college, that I didn’t have to marry a Read More
What could be more appropriately festive and French than the opening of Laetitia Colombani’s He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not on Valentine’s Day at the Paris Theatre? Think of it: a Gallic man-woman romp starring Audrey Tautou, the winsome ingenue star of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001), in her latest role as Angélique, a lovelorn Read More
Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mil e, from a screenplay by Scott Silver, has provided me with my brightest and most surprising pop-music epiphany since the Beatles in Richard Lester and Alun Owen’s A Hard Day’s Night shook up all my critical preconceptions 38 years ago and made me proclaim A Hard Day’s Night “the Citizen Kane Read More
Tonie Marshall’s Venus Beauty Institute , from her own screenplay, has won several French César awards: best picture, best director, best screenplay and best young actress (Audrey Tautou). Curiously, the French honors did not include best actress for Nathalie Baye as Angèle, the film’s clearly dominant performance. One of four women ministering to the cosmetic Read More
