Francis Ford Coppola channels Almodovar, but doesn’t quite capture the magic. The setting in La Boca in Buenos Aires is wonderful, as is the Penelope Cruz stand-in, Maribel Verdu. In fact, the black-and-white triangle of Verdu, the young Bennie, and the overly intense Vincent Gallo is the movie’s Pinteresque strength. The flashbacks in contrasting color […]
You don’t go to a Warhol exhibition expecting to see a Vermeer or a Rembrandt, but you don’t expect to find only a Jeff Koons, either. Quentin Tarantino obviously has all the techniques of moviemaking at his disposal, but he failed to engage me emotionally or intellectually, and for every gripping scene there was a […]
As far as the movie goes, it was a lot of buildup, not much payoff. The comparison that came to mind is Man on Wire – assembling the team, figuring out equipment, evading detection, etc. – but there the climax was moments of pure exhilaration and triumph, here it was a scene not too different […]
Who are the bad guys here? Is it the “prawns” from outer space? The Nigerian hoodlums? The profit-driven corporate chieftains at MNU? Or the trigger-happy South African Defense Force? We know the good guy is the pencil-pusher Wikus van der Merve, and what a good guy! Meak, somewhat wimpy, none too bright, and yet he […]
This is a one-trick movie, and once you see that it is a dirty trick being played on the viewer, the modest respect I had for the Hawaiian scenery and Steve Zahn’s character flew out the window. There are “red snappers” – I mean, herrings – galore, but the switcheroo is not of that ilk. […]
Glad I saw this with my wife because, whereas I saw Summer as gorgeous perfection, too good for any guy in this movie, my wife saw Summer as vapid, emotionally withholding, not worthy of Tom, whom I saw as a feckless twerp. Of course, we were both right, which is a testament to the fine […]
This was an indelicate subject made with surprising delicacy, thanks especially to a compellingly rational lead talking-head, Eric Schlosser. The glaring weakness was the lack of a two-sided argument: none of the big food companies that were vilified – Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson, etc. – were willing to be interviewed, which left me to wonder if […]
Hysterically funny, at least the half I was able to catch. It was paced like a sitcom, and the performances were uniformly over-the-top, but the whole fit seamlessly together, like fingers in a glove. An especially deft and novel leitmotif was the role of 20-somethings, pulling and being hit by levers in the power corridors […]
What an expensively handsome emotional zero! A film eulogizing a murdering bank robber was probably misconceived to begin with, but then to direct both John Dillinger and G-man Melvin Purvis as one-dimensional ensured that our sympathies would not be engaged. The love interest, played by Marion Cotillard, set off no sparks, either. The only character […]
I had never heard of the “naïve” artist Seraphine de Senlis, but discovering at movie’s end that she was a real person explained in large part why this film was so dramatically inert. To take but one example, Wilhelm Uhde had to flee Senlis at the outset of World War I because that actually happened, […]
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