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 […]
Powerful. There’s not much suspense in the story, if you’ve read the book or even a movie review, but the drama is carried by a tour-de-force performance by Jessica Chastain–best I’ve ever seen her. Eddie Redmayne is the other “good nurse,” and his strange accent makes his character fairly inscrutable, which, it turns out, is […]
I have no idea what this movie was about; moreover, I couldn’t understand half the dialogue. (What language were they using – Scottish? Irish? English?) A single dad spends a vacation week with his ten-year-old daughter at a modest Turkish resort (no White Lotus), and nothing unusual happens–except they seem to manage to spend all […]
A self-evidently Northern European film in its discussions of class, capitalism, socialism, gender, race and more class. Not that it’s particularly intellectual or probing. It is, in fact, quite crude and simplistic. And half-again too long, with many scenes that drag and others–such as a forced dip in the ocean by the staff–that could have […]
A portrait of the (superhero) artist as a young man, set in 1980 Queens instead of 1914 Dublin. Our hero is likable but not commendable, and the one we feel sympathy for is his Black friend, Johnny Davis. Paul’s family, notably Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong don’t mesh, but maybe that’s the way Paul saw […]
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