Huh? Expecting some sly sociopolitical comment, all I got was a cliched shoot-’em-up, battle scenes galore and nothing that made much sense. The super-achieving, premise-defying girl was great, but I had trouble telling one ape from another. The movie moved quickly, though.
Our first two shows on Broadway for the spring 2024 season shared sensational staging. For Enemy of the People, lighting by paraffin lamps, spare furniture and drab black costumes at Circle in the Square let us feel we were back in 19th century Norway. Postwar London for The Who’s Tommy wasn’t so much a location […]
An old-form Woody Allen short story, set in the streets and party rooms of Paris instead of New York: four characters, lots of talk about marriage and life, and just when you start to care about what happens to the people we get a goofy, comic ending. It’s fun to be back in France and […]
Never have I cared less who won a tennis match. Or, for that matter, spent two hours with three less attractive, less interesting people. Pretty much everything about the tennis rang false, except perhaps the arrested development of the players. If this is what’s getting good reviews these days, heaven help the viewers over a […]
As a fan of Japanese history and culture and having read positive reviews, I was looking forward to spending the next couple weeks watching the ten-part Shogun. Episode 1, however, left me annoyed, despite the wonderful costumes and pageantry. How could John Blackthorn emerge from the wasted schooner, where starvation had struck the crew, with a […]
Two good in-flight movies, following basic formulas: boy-meets-girl for Anyone But You and coming of age for Blinded By the Light. There are no surprises, but attractive leads make the predictable stories fun to watch. Blinded, of course, benefits from a soundtrack of great Bruce Springsteen songs. Anyone left me with the question of what makes a relationship? […]
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 […]
I felt I was watching My Dinner With Andre, times three or four, held in a rural, charmless Turkish village in winter, in the snow. The “hero” tested the viewer’s sympathy by lying to his student, psychologically abusing her, betraying his roommate, taking advantage of a disabled woman and being a crappy teacher. But he was […]
What better setting for a horror flick than a convent somewhere out in the Italian countryside? When Sydney Sweeney, playing a young naif from Detroit, takes her vows in a foreign tongue she little expects that the Immaculate Conception of the movie’s title will be thrust, unwillingly as 20 centuries before, upon her. The Catholic […]
As good as Timothee Chalamet was in Wonka, he’s that bad in Dune. His thin frame and wispy good looks do not an action hero make. I suppose there is a story, as the film is based on a famous book, but I couldn’t discern it. The ‘2’ in the title might have tipped me off to the […]
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