THE PLATES
When my companion griped about not having the exact street address of this restaurant, I assured him he couldn’t miss it — “it’s covered in plates.” The exterior of this small restaurant boasts only about a dozen large plates, but inside, it’s dishes galore. The walls are covered in plates — from tacky souvenir plates…
THE HOURS
For all the time and space it navigates, and with all that its characters suffer, Stephen Daldry’s film of The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s elegiac Pulitzer Prize novel, finally feels like it occurs in one concentrated moment. That might well be a good thing for such a literary movie. But in the case of The Hours,…
THE CRIME OF FATHER AMARO
You’d think that provincial Mexico could dangle only so many temptations in front of a Catholic priest. But in the somberly entertaining, hard-nosed soap opera The Crime of Father Amaro, it seems a young curate suffers most of them — and falls rather short of the example of Jesus conferencing with Satan on the mountain.…
NICHOLAS NICKLEBY
You can cheer for Nicholas (Charlie Hunnam) — with his flaxen hair, pallid (i.e. English) skin, charismatic smile and angelic heart — who becomes the man of his family at 19 when his father dies penniless. You can hiss when his Uncle (a grandly malevolent Christopher Plummer) connives to ruin Nick’s life, or when the…
