A buddy film about fighter pilots and their planes that had the bad timing to be released the same year as Top Gun: Maverick. Its only ace was the (true) story of its Black hero overcoming racial discrimination in the military during the Korean War. Curiously, however, Jesse Brown was portrayed by Jonathan Majors with a […]
This is all Emma Corrin – and you certainly see all of Emma Corrin. She is gorgeous and affecting as a young woman consumed by her own sexuality. By contrast, the two men in her life are underdrawn, or poorly drawn; and the larger themes involving gender, class and society, that I expect are developed […]
A portrait of the (cinema) artist as a young man, demonstrating the power of movies, even as we sat in a mostly empty theater. The story was sweet, if conventional, and well told, per usual for Stephen Spielberg. One wonders, though, how it would play if the viewer didn’t know beforehand that the story was […]
Talk about a slow movie, this one (on Netflix) practically came to a halt several times, until it finally did. Jennifer Lawrence was fine, and to her credit she didn’t affect a New Orleans accent; can’t say the same about Brian Tyree Henry, though, to the extent I could understand him. Beyond good work from […]
A donkey? Really? Maybe this was a comment on life in Poland (not good) in places the donkey happened to be, although the donkey had no real role, other than looking donkey-like. Times were mostly tough – no respect – and they didn’t come to a happy end.
Without much effort, my Top Ten for 2021 could all be movies made outside the U.S.; only a personal affinity for Don’t Look Up, a movie more scorned by the critics, prevented a shutout. Whether this had anything to do with Covid restrictions on film production, I don’t know. I do know that it relates to […]
While the movie was set in 1923 rural Ireland, it could as easily have been written then, by Sean O’Casey or J.M. Synge, so well it captured the tragedy of the Irish: men living a hardscrabble existence, playing music (hence the title), going to the pub, making a mountain out of a molehill and being […]
Absurdly stupid or stupidly absurd, take your pick. Whereas the original Knives Out revolved around a relatable family with understandable issues, this “sequel” featured an all-star cast of incredible (as in, non-credible) characters who formed no sort of family and were hard to care about, if not actually odious. And whereas the Daniel Craig character, as […]
A solid telling of a heartwarming story, although we knew, of course, everything before it happened. The other challenge was how to dramatize phone calls, which led to a lot of interruptions while tending to the kids, walking down the street, meeting with the boss and sleeping. I have no idea why someone felt it […]
A delicious spoof of foam restaurants and foodies until it takes a sour turn mid-movie and becomes a typically implausible horror flick that reduces its cast to sniveling nonentities. The setup and the characters, notably Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult, make up ingredients for an entertaining parody that could, I wished, have gone in a […]
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