No surprises and nothing original, but in managing to tie up multiple stories with happy endings for everybody–and I mean everybody–Julian Fellowes brought a few tears to my eyes and gave us a pleasant afternoon in the movie house. Everything was a bit pat and no scene lasted more than its allotted 60 seconds; it was […]
This one required a suspension of disbelief that I couldn’t quite muster. Or maybe it didn’t. Or maybe I missed something when the slow pace put me briefly to sleep. Two look-alike 8-year-old girls meet in the woods and I kept waiting–mercifully for only 1:18–for a plot to emerge. Three points for sincerity.
It felt like an art museum, the Watteau gallery in particular, with soldiers parading and lovers dallying. By adapting a classic play, the movie suspended disbelief and even made the songs feel integral to the plot, which they were. Peter Dinklage, of course, is not a traditional Cyrano, but again, we weren’t looking for realism […]
Not for everyone, but if you came to it expecting Neil Labute’s typically cruel depiction of a male-female relationship you wouldn’t have been disappointed by Justin Long’s bumbling attempt at seduction or Kate Bosworth’s innocent iciness, not to mention the bloody denouement. With only one set and three actors (plus a cameo), this was evidently […]
A history of volunteers at Israeli kibbutzes, told through archival footage and ex post facto interviews, making no point, having no point of view, presenting no reason for its existence as a documentary film.
Hate to call a movie “cute,” but this was adorable. No bad guys, no one got hurt, nothing really “happened,” just three 19-year-olds figuring things out in suburban Long Island, with a lot of beer, a little weed and some locals. This played like the low-budget first feature of recent film school grads, which it […]
You could make a movie about the problems caused by the cruise industry, or the evil of raising and training wild animals for human amusement, or the lack of qualifications required to volunteer teach in the developing world, or the self-absorption promoted by social media, or the difficulty of experiencing art masterpieces, or overpopulation in […]
This is sort of a Don’t Look Up for lions: why are we fighting over something trivial like different eye color when our entire species faces extinction? The story could not have been told more intimately if the director had used animation. Extraordinary documentary footage of two lion prides in southern Tanzania shows the lions […]
I laughed, then I cried, then laughed then cried some more. With so many laugh-out-loud one-liners and tried-but-true heart tugs, it was easy to overlook the absurdities in the amazingly “based-on-a-true-story” plot (to begin with, that Maurice Flitcroft could shoot a 123 in his first round of golf). Mark Rylance is pitch-perfect in the role […]
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 […]
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