A paean to French cuisine, featuring a cast straight out of 19th-century paintings by Fantin-Latour, Manet, Caillebotte, Cezanne, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec (you get the picture). Unfortunately, it is as devoid of plot as any film I can remember. Identifying ingredients and cooking methods can only go so far, and when another meal starts it’s time to […]
A Danish version of Shane, without the subtlety. There wasn’t a character, plot development or scene that offered any surprise. Mads Mikkelsen is a pleasure to watch, but he joined the class of Joaquin Phoenix and Adam Driver for fewest facial expressions in a role. I couldn’t count the number of movie cliches that piled atop […]
I couldn’t get past the horrible dubbing of the Netflix version to give this a serious viewing. The subject did not appeal to me, hence I avoided it in the theater, and the hokey, inauthentic English-language dialogue left me, so to speak, cold.
A sweetly intense performance by Leonie Benesch as a new sixth-grade teacher having a bad week at school. I couldn’t figure out how the various conflicts would get resolved, and felt better when the director couldn’t either. In the meantime, though, there were memorable characters and dilemmas that made you think in this worthy Oscar […]
With so many presumptive winners already in place, thanks to industry scuttlebutt and numerous awards from critics and industry groups, it is the nomination announcements that offer modest surprises and merit discussion. And with one movie, Oppenheimer, so clearly superior to the rest of the field, the Oscar ceremony itself will tend to boring; so […]
Recommended mainly for the performance by Annette Bening (so much better than Emma Stone’s), who created a character that neatly meshed with the archival footage of the eponymous marathon swimmer. The story of inhuman endurance was catnip for directors Chin/Vasarhelyi, after Meru, Free Solo and Rescue. Their problem here is that swimming from Cuba to Key […]
A sick movie. The fantasy sets of 19th century European cities were fun, especially Dickens’s London, but there was nothing to enjoy in the rest of the two hours and twenty minutes of ugliness. The story was beyond absurd and if that was to make a point, I surely missed it. Emma Stone’s Golden Globe […]
An artwork by master director Wim Wenders about the unique and overwhelming art of Anselm Kiefer, for my money the greatest living artist. The 3-D projection floats us into the world of Kiefer’s sculpture, architecture and deeply perspective paintings. We see hints of his artmaking technique: slabbing on paint (or tar?), pouring lead, blowtorching vegetal […]
This hand-drawn animated feature by the 83-year-old Hayao Miyazaki, purportedly the “most expensive film” ever made in Japan, is visually breathtaking. The movie’s first half, when young Mahito is taken to the country estate of his new mother, captures everything I saw and felt in my high-school summer in Japan, with a landscape from Yoshida […]
An engaging cast of caricatures tickles some serious subjects in the first (or at least best) Black-Lives-Matters-Culture-Page-backlash film of the year. I’m generally uneasy watching someone pretending to be someone he isn’t and experienced that discomfort here, but it all worked out in the clever end, which added an additional meta layer on Cord Jefferson’s […]
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