Dave Kehr

In 1985, the producer-director team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory created ''A Room With a View,'' an adaptation of E.M. Forster`s comic novel of Edwardian courtship that became an...

Movies don`t come much more self-conscious than Rob Reiner`s ''The Princess Bride,'' an often parodic swashbuckler presented as a yellowing boy`s book read to a child by his kindly, mildly...

''Near Dark'' is a vampire Western. It`s also dreamy, passionate and terrifying, a hallucinatory vision of the American nightworld that becomes both seductive and devastating. For director Kathryn Bigelow, it...

Lyle Kessler`s play ''Orphans'' came to fame as a production of Chicago`s Steppenwolf Theater; it has now been made into a movie by Alan J. Pakula (''All the President`s Men''),...

Camp is something that can`t be created self-consciously, as a whole recent string of failed attempts-from ''Reform School Girls'' to ''Straight to Hell''-makes painfully clear. Norman Mailer`s film of ''Tough...

It would be one thing if ''A Man in Love'' was the story of a man in love. But French filmmaker Diane Kurys (''Entre Nous,'' ''Peppermint Soda''), making her English-language...

John Huston-boxer, opera singer, cavalry lieutenant, actor, writer, sculptor, painter, newspaper reporter, combat cameraman and raconteur-died in his sleep early Friday. Mr. Huston was 81, and in his spare time...

Turning John Farrow`s 1948 film noir ''The Big Clock'' into a timely paranoid thriller set in the corridors of power of Washington, D.C., Roger Donaldson`s ''No Way Out'' displays a...

With this comic thriller, director and writer Robert Benton (''Places in the Heart'') seems to have wanted to offer a valentine to Kim Basinger, the tall, lithe, Southern beauty who...

Like most show-biz biographies, ''La Bamba,'' writer-director Luis Valdez`s study of `50s rock star Ritchie Valens, isn`t much interested in show biz. Music plays a relatively unimportant role in the...