If I didn’t know “Malik” is Arabic for “king,” I would have thought it meant “Godfather,” so much does this two-hour, forty-minute Indian epic borrow from the Coppola classics, not only characters and plot, but several scenes that are direct lifts. (Then again, maybe in the Malayalam language that’s what it means.) Unfortunately, Fahadh Faasil, […]
90 minutes of home movies without any discernible plot or organizing principle. By the end I had no idea what a “volcanologist” is or whether this couple were actual scientists or merely storm-chasers. What they were “studying” was never disclosed. If their only contribution was to warn people that volcanoes are dangerous, that hardly seems […]
Call me stonehearted, but I wasn’t touched by Mrs. Harris or her story. The good guys were too sweet, the bad guys too ugly and nothing met the plausibility test. Individually, however, the characters were charming, especially Natasha, and the clothes were almost worth the price of admission.
Much better than I expected. The action takes place from 1953 to 1969, and the film feels like it. When was the last time we saw a hero as decent, sincere, handsome and blond as Tate? The story is just as implausible as it was in the book, but the imperfect crime at its climax […]
The title acknowledges the film’s duality – one part about the man, the other about the song. The former is interesting but leaves the singer as inscrutable as he was going in: ladies’ man? Zen monk? fraud victim? poet? The story of the song is more satisfying, and the song is great. I wonder, however, […]
An absurdist comedy about a “culinary collective” that was too far off the mainstream for me. One of those films where you feel the director has a cult of 17 followers, and you’re not one of them.
I fear for the movies, when this is counted as the major release for the month, and the four trailers previewed are all for horror films that seemingly favor special effects over real people or situations. A thriller(?) depending upon an alien spaceship is especially hard to take seriously at the same time we are […]
How many people can you kill without any discernible justification or plausibility seems to be the calling card of this Netflix franchise-wannabe, featuring Ryan Gosling in the Bourne/Bond role and a slew of other actors who are either bad (e.g., Rege-Jean Page as Carmichael) or as cliched as the plot.
Hilarious! Antonio Banderas steals the movie, as well as the movie-within-the-movie, in a master class of actors acting at acting–all very meta. A bewigged Penelope Cruz is perfection as a dominatrix director, and Argentinian actor Oscar Martinez holds his own against showboat performances from his Spanish co-stars. The plot is a stage for a string […]
A tight and satisfying little horror film. The bloody denouement doesn’t really make sense–this isn’t Hitchcock or Wait Until Dark–but the more realistic tension is in the marriage: how can the husband bring his bride to Bucharest, where she knows no one and doesn’t speak the language, and ignore her isolation? Santa Barbara-born Maika Monroe is […]
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