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 […]
Fortunately, the “worst person in the world” is not Renate Reinsve, who is the most approachably beautiful movie heroine of the year, including Penelope Cruz and Caitriona Balfe. But more than her Julie, this is a film about relationships: how they start, how they develop, and how they end. Director Joachim Trier tells the story […]
A thrillingly different Eastern European film, this one from Romania with lots of blah shots of Bucharest and other social commentary. In Part 1 we meet the teacher, whose porn selfie with her husband has gotten loose on the Internet, as she wanders the streets, like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Part 2 I didn’t get, […]
A sweet, rather predictable tale of a cynical and lazy city teacher who is assigned to “the most remote school in the world” and discovers teaching, and himself. It was lovely to see the ghos and the landscapes of Bhutan, and it brought back memories of my year in Libya with the Peace Corps; but […]
Eight thousand years from now, with all the technological advances, they still fight like the Norman Conquest, or maybe the siege of Troy? Absurdity piles on absurdity, so much that we might as well be watching a comic book. If the .0001 per cent of the population that hasn’t been reduced to drone ant level […]
An unabashedly over-the-top depiction of the Gucci family saga, with megawatt performances by Lady Gaga, Jared Leto, Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons–the whole family except Adam Driver, a hole in the middle, who acted mainly by changing his hairstyle. There’s no point in quibbling over the plot, because it was a true story. If you […]
Directorially brilliant, Todd Haynes’s portrait of the seminal punk rock group packs the wallop of the Velvets’ best music. He mixes archival footage from the era with wonderful modern interviews, all the while explaining how their songs came to be and, best of all, how they sounded. Like many, I knew three or four of […]
Not a major Almodovar, but any story he chooses to tell is worth watching, and every minute spent with Penelope Cruz is a pleasure. The story of the two mothers and their babies is gripping, seemingly enough in itself for a film. The story of Franco’s victims is also moving, but what does one story […]
A thriller recounting the exploits of…a Swiss private banker, who is eager, if not desperate, not to lose his accounts. The most interesting character is his predecessor, who is mentioned by everyone but does not appear in the film. Cigarette smoking is the closest things come to action. As a portrait of the Buenos Aires […]
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