Ed Koch

The Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film is entertaining, but can everyone keep up?… More »

Like the Brooke Shields classic, this movie is about love on an island. It's also one of the few films worth seeing this season.… More »

The film about China's 19th-century civil wars is good, but other movies in the same genre are more worth watching… More »

Ignore any recommendations you may have heard: this movie's jokes are dumb and its plot is boring… More »

This acclaimed movie shows how the Italian dictator drove his first wife and his son into mental institutions… More »

The new Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried movie moves at a slow pace and offers few surprises… More »

The new Matt Damon film about the Iraq war is heavy on the Bush-bashing and lacks a coherent, believable plot… More »

New York's former mayor enjoyed this film about the city's police force--but a former city councilmember panned it… More »

'Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Sűss' documents a family grappling with the Nazi propaganda an ancestor made… More »

The former mayor of New York City on why you should watch the exiled director's latest film… More »

The tensions at play in this film echo the struggles faced by other prisoners—both fictional and real… More »

Regrettably, there are not many interesting films to see at this time. Since I write two movie reviews for publication each week, I decided to see The Last New Yorker after reading Stephen Holden's review in The New York Times. He wasn't precise in describing the story line, but his comments about the film providing a tour of Manhattan's sites from the view of a lonely, elderly, near down-and-out man, intrigued me. Lenny (Dominic Chianese) is in his late 70's or…… More »

This complex Israeli production lays out in great detail the lives of Jews, Muslims and Christians as they interact both in Israel and the West Bank. At the end of the film, I met two old friends-MB and her husband TS. She, a great author, had just seen Ajami and described it as "wonderful and wrenching." I agree with her and would only add that the writer was as fair to all sides in that great religious conflict as anyone could be. The central characters in the…… More »

For several weeks the selection of films has been very meager, but the drought appears to have ended. I read favorable reviews of a half-dozen pictures that opened over the weekend. Although I often disagree with the comments of many reviewers, believing they are too soft and too accepting of movies, I concurred with A. O. Scott's Times review of "Eyes Wide Open." He wrote: "The three principal actors are remarkably adept at signaling nuances of longing,…… More »

Frozen is a tour de force, not because of exceptional performances by the actors, but rather the outstanding directing of Adam Green, who also wrote the script. The script gave Green a limited area within which to work, and he carried it off superbly. Three friends who appear to be in their 20s or early 30s--Parker (Emma Bell), Joe (Shawn Ashmore), and Dan (Kevin Zegers)--go skiing for a weekend at a New England resort. When the slope is about to…… More »

At the end of Edge of Darkness, one of my movie companions said, "This is one of the ten worst films I have ever sat through." I agreed with his conclusion. Surprisingly, the Daily News reviewer gave this picture three stars. The story is repetitious of earlier films like Silkwood. In that picture, a young woman working at a nuclear processing plant seeks to expose her employer for subjecting his employees to the unsafe handling of dangerous radioactive…… More »

With all of its faults, The Last Station will satisfy even those only slightly familiar with the works of Leo Tolstoy and the time in which he lived. The script, I believe, is an historical rendering of Tolstoy's last years. He was a presence in the era of the last Russian Czar, Nicholas II, and he became a symbol of freedom during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union when his house, a museum at the time, was captured and vandalized by the Nazi…… More »

Last year I went to see Leonard Cohen's sold-out performance at Madison Square Garden at $250 a ticket. I had never heard of him, but my companions extolled his art, particularly his lyrics. Those lyrics are deemed to be poetry by his followers, very much in the style of Bob Dylan. The audience couldn't get enough of him. I did not particularly enjoy that concert and wondered if I would feel differently about Cohen and his talents if I didn't have to pay such a…… More »

Manohla Dargis's favorable review of this movie in The New York Times--one of those amorphous kudos--was, in my opinion, undeserved. She wrote: "The film can be described as a character study or a fictionalized slice of terribly real life. Mostly, though, it is an inquiry into the mysteries of other people." While not a terrible picture, this is certainly not a first-rate movie. The narrative consists of several stories and subplots, and the main characters in…… More »

As I left the theater I asked HG, with whom I saw the film, what he thought. He replied, "That was no Hansel and Gretel story." His response was a quaint but appropriate way of saying that this picture is no walk in the park. The story takes place before World War I in a small German village which has its own baron (Ulrich Tukur). The waving fields of grain and gardens of cabbage give the impression of a simple, idyllic environment in which to live. But…… More »