Entries by Bob Marshall

Sing Sing – 8

A feel-good story of prison inmates putting on a play, with an Oscar-worthy performance by Colman Domingo anchoring an amateur cast of real-life prisoners playing themselves. The play’s not the thing. What we get to see and feel is inmates experiencing their own humanity through performing in prison and by extension in this movie. There’s […]

The Room Next Door – 6.5

A meditation on dying and friendship with lots of close-ups of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. They are obviously both fine actresses, but the formal, slightly stilted dialogue sounded as though it were written in a foreign language (Spanish?) then translated. I felt I was at a dramatic reading with attractive settings. Still, a must-see […]

Evil Does Not Exist – 7.9

A quiet look at Japanese culture on the surface, and below that at man’s relationship to nature. Elegiac in its simplicity, the film bespeaks director Hamaguchi’s mastery and confidence – as in, who needs a plot when an image says so much. A review kindly called the ending “ambiguous,” whereas I’d say “inscrutable.” Or another […]

The Last Showgirl – 6.5

A poignant, sympathetic look at a fading art form and its star practitioner. The direction was unusually realistic for an American film, although I found the jittery hand-held camerawork distracting. Pamela Anderson played ditzy well, but Jamie Lee Curtis’s supporting performance was to me more interesting. Sweet and sad.

Top Ten 2023

Taking a cue from the Oscars and in another way the Golden Globes, I have divided my Top Ten for 2023 into two categories: five of the very best were foreign-language films, and I was able to cobble together five respectable movies in English. Contrary to what the critics said, and seem to say every […]

A Complete Unknown – 8

The music alone makes this one of the most enjoyable films of this or any year. Hardly five minutes go by without another song, and it’s usually a great song we know and love, and it’s integral to the story. The actors do the vocals themselves, which makes it all more real, and they are […]

His Three Daughters – 6

A wonderfully acted character study of three screwed-up sisters who await their father’s death just as we await a plot. Instead of a resolution, or even some character development, however unlikely, we are given a final scene that is either Magical Realism, a projection of someone’s inner thoughts or the director’s cop-out. With only one […]

Juror #2 – 7

A parade of moral dilemmas kept us hanging and thinking until the end, and beyond, as the Clint Eastwood film held off providing any answers at all. As in almost every courtroom drama, this realism-loving ex-lawyer found many “I-don’t-think-so’s” as the action proceeded, but the essential question of how to get to “justice” came through. […]