Alviro-Mario Fantini

As a long-time admirer—even an enthusiast—of Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy of novels (Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post) that go under the collective title of Parade’s End, I expected not to…

Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain, based very loosely on a true story as told in a series of article in Miami New Times by Pete Collins, comes to its too-long delayed ending as the closing credits are played out to…

Spoiler alert! I’m always surprised and a little chagrined at the fetish so many people make out of being surprised by a movie’s ending, as if every picture were by Hitchcock and could only justify the demands it makes on…

The headline of the New York Times review of Michael Apted’s 56 Up reads: “The British Class Divide, on a Personal Scale.” This refers to the eighth film in a series which has followed the same group of Britons since they…

Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah) has had the bad luck to have his new movie, Reality, labeled a satire of reality TV. People, some of them critics, therefore think they know what to expect and express disappointment when they don’t get it….

One of the things I liked best among the many things I liked about Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007, was that, while looking to liberals like the sort…

THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY of the publication of Pride and Prejudice in January seems a good opportunity to celebrate not only the fiction of what my university used to call “the English moralists,” but the moralistic tendency in art itself. Although…

In real life, as we’re often reminded, anything can happen. It’s one of the things that makes it so real. In the movies, however, that is not the case. In the movies, what happens determines, and is determined by, what…

There is a gratuitous scene in the middle of Identity Thief that adds nothing to the plot but that is meant — I’m just guessing here — to add to the humor of the thing. Our heroes, the eponymous Identity…