Film

‘Is there any place on campus where they recite the Liturgy of the Hours?” The two undergraduates who popped into the sacristy after one of those tiny mid-morning, midweek gatherings for Eucharist in a university chapel took me by surprise. Why would two young women want to squeeze one m

The rituals of the suburban cocktail party play out predictably. Sometime during the late afternoon, amid the gleaming borrowed chafing dishes and the fluttering corporate wives, one of the guests, grown progressively less inhibited through drink, raises a glass to toast the beautiful hostess. She s

Road to Perdition begins and ends with a young boy looking out over Lake Michigan. His voice-over narration in the opening shot leads the way to the lengthy flashback that provides the story line of the film. The camera, however, stares out over the faceless waters with him, as though pondering his

Those of us of a certain age can sympathize with poor Cecily (Reese Witherspoon), a prisoner of grammar lessons taught by the indefatigable and assertively dull Miss Prism (Anna Massey). Oscar Wilde certainly did, when he put her in The Importance of Being Earnest. Yet those tedious days of Latin an

That delightful lull between the end of classes and the beginning of exams provided the perfect opportunity to catch up on movies missed during the last several months. As it turns out, Iand thus regular readers of this columnhave missed little. Two walls of the neighborhood video shop feature new r

For the last several months images of heroism have filled the media. The immediate heroes, the firefighters, police and rescue workers, have gradually been supplanted by brave survivors, mourning the dead and living for the future. Their stories have helped us through the horror, especially in this

Frantically searching for ways to postpone sitting down at the keyboard and trying to find something relatively new to say about the most over-analyzed film and social phenomenon of the year, I idly called up my favorite search engine and typed in harrypotter. The monitor blinked once and then came

Even by the generous criteria generally applied to summer films, last summer was a particularly disappointing season. Vacation movies target young audiences with young themes, and, as a result, they emerge half-baked from the minds of young, or wannabe young, filmmakers. Okay, I plead nolo contender