It’s surprising that it takes a documentary to introduce the founder of the Rolling Stones and lead/rhythm guitarist until he was fired and died shortly thereafter in 1969, well after the Stones were world phenomena. Similarly surprising is that after watching the documentary he is still pretty much a cipher in my consciousness. Bill Wyman […]
A sad and bizarre story, told with exquisite delicacy and enough pink to tempt Barbie. I don’t know how accurate the portrayal of Priscilla was (was she really that short?), but since Sofia Coppola’s script was based on Priscilla Presley’s book and Priscilla was an executive producer of the film, I’ll accept it, with some […]
Perhaps Ridley Scott watched The Crown and thought, Hey, I can do this for France. Unfortunately, his swings at royal romance, political intrigue and historical drama were all whiffs. For some reason, Joaquin Phoenix as the lead was made to appear uncharismatic, uncoordinated, a terrible lover, phlegmatic and taciturn – hardly the image of the […]
Hard to decide what bothered me more: the bizarre accents and clipped, unintelligible dialogue from Bradley Cooper, especially, and Carey Mulligan; the characters’, especially Cooper’s, obsessive smoking; or the lack of a plot. Rather than care for Lenny Bernstein, I couldn’t wait for this unpleasant person to get off the screen. Sarah Silverman, on the […]
A throwback movie in every sense from the reliably delightful Alexander Payne, it even made me like Paul Giamatti as the curmudgeonly prep school teacher with a well hidden heart of gold. As someone who spent three snowy Decembers at a boys’ school outside Boston in the ’60s, I felt a certain distant affinity for […]
I had to take this in in two sittings, it was so long and so loud (as was the audience of young women). It’s hard to find fault with Taylor Swift, and I couldn’t. Some songs were better than others, but it probably helped if you knew them all by heart, as most of the […]
A French psycho-drama from Justine Triet and production company “didshedoit.com,” which is the movie’s hook. The director prejudiced the question whether the husband’s fall was a suicide or a murder by making the prosecution witnesses bombastic and the prosecutor smarmy and not good-looking, as against a sympathetic defendant (a measured and marvelous Sandra Huller) and […]
A happy-making bauble from John Carney, previously responsible for Once and Sing Street,” with which it shares a Dublin setting and charming, sensitive songs. Eve Hewson is the whole reason to watch, and it is a good one; she is brassy but not abrasive, pretty but real, and her three relationships–with her son, her ex-husband […]
I could have used a lot more about the music, even more about the political activism and the personalities of her world, and a lot less about the sturm und drang of her psychological state, especially since she came across as a wonderfully adjusted, successful and attractive 80-year-old. And what a terrible title!
There is surprisingly little drama in this movie, perhaps because we knew the story but just as likely because the pacing is so s-l-o-w. After three hours forty minutes with no resolution, Martin Scorsese flips to a simulated radiocast to wrap things up, leaving his characters to meet their fates offstage. My other problem is […]
© Copyright 2019 Robert Marshall | All Rights Reserved.