A new take on the Lone-Samurai (ronin) character familiar from Yojimbo and Sanjuro. The bustling 18th-century setting is fun, but Kurosawa and Mifune are missing, and missed. The role of go was a bit hard to swallow, but worse was a lack of subtlety, more expected in a film from 1970 than 2024.
Four characters and their permutational relationships is the essence, indeed almost the totality, of this film. After all the bluff and bluster of American cinema, it’s refreshing to return to a European film, this directed by the German auteur Christian Petzold, with no special effects, hardly any scenery, no dramatic soundtrack, just real people coping. […]
Took advantage of my wife’s absence to catch up on two critically lauded (Washington Post maybe?) films from the last two years and was glad she was away. Both were unwatchable, if for different reasons. In Peter Hujar’s Day nothing happens, which is intentional, but in the day he describes nothing happens, too. And for […]
Who needs good acting when you know where the Colleen Hoover formula plot is going. Maika Monroe is easy on the eyes, but the premise she embodies is wobbly: who sends a young woman with no record to jail for seven years when the car she’s driving hits a rock, rolls over and her fiance […]
Marks for message, but as cinema it was overlong, lacking drama and repetitive–too many shots of an empty school corridor. Although it won the Oscar, I can think of four or five better documentaries at the recent SB Film Festival.
Director Baz Luhrman atones for his dismal 2022 biopic Elvis with a joyful homage based on concert and rehearsal footage from the early 1970s, when Elvis was the greatest showman of our lifetime. The documentary plays his songs complete and gives full play to his twinkling smile and kidding personality. There are just enough interjections of […]
“Weird” is too mild a descriptor for this Yorgas Lanthimos-Emma Stone-Jesse Plemons excursion into George Saunders-like surreality. Nothing makes sense in a very consistent way, and there is a sobering moral in a final scene that must have doubled the production budget (unless it was AI-generated, which would also be appropriate). While the film was […]
Sometimes you just long for an old-fashioned movie with a linear plot, dialogue you can understand, a satisfying story arc and a character or two you can like or even connect with emotionally. Instead, Kristen Stewart’s first directorial effort seemed designed to establish her bona fides as an artsy auteur with the portrait of an […]
Having seen all the contenders except Bugonia (the sour taste of Poor Things still lingers), I’m ready to anoint my Oscar choices for 2025, limiting myself to the official nominees: Best Actor Ethan Hawke. An easy decision. He held the screen the entire movie, captivated us although he wasn’t attractive by any measure, and so inhabited the […]
If a comedy, not funny. If a drama, not dramatic. If social commentary, no comment. After an hour we looked at each other, mouthed the word “stupid,” and departed. The culture gap between us and this Korean Oscar submission must have been too wide.
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