A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Belfast–Italian Style, Paolo Sorrentino’s love letter to growing up in Naples in the 1980s captures La Famiglia in all its frictions and closeness. His style is distinctive: every scene is short and self-contained, without musical background (except once). His characters, too, are distinctive: the lusty […]
Billed a “fable,” this is more a ghost story, about a haunted Lady Di. I lost emotional attachment early on, when I realized that I wouldn’t be able to understand Kristen Stewart’s breathy, stage-whispered dialogue and that the portrait being painted of a hallucinating, bulimic princess hounded by a monolithic, unfeeling royal family was so […]
My Fair Lady has the best songs, but West Side Story has the best score of any Broadway musical, and it was a treat to hear it (conducted by Gustavo Dudamel) on a big screen in a big theater (with only two other people). The story of Romeo (Tony) and Juliet (Maria) has stood the test […]
The three hours address, in turn, three separate relationships: Kafuku and his wife; Kafuku and Takatsuki, the reckless young actor; Kafuku and his 23-year-old driver. None is resolved. Hidetoshi Nishijima as Kafuku experiences one intense emotion after another with hardly a tremor’s difference in his expression. A Buddhist upbringing, perhaps? In any case, his face […]
This is all about Will Smith, which is good and bad: his performance is incredible, but there’s a lot of it and it doesn’t change. Except for his wife (Aunjanue Ellis), who has one searing scene, the other characters are caricatures. Ever see five young sisters all playing happily together all the time? And the […]
Maybe if you don’t find 9-year-old Jesse a spoiled brat; or Uncle Johnny’s “job” interviewing children rather silly; or the scene changes from Detroit to Los Angeles to New York to New Orleans rather pointless; or the history of brother-sister conflict between Johnny and Viv less than interesting, then maybe you will be charmed by […]
Given Jane Campion’s track record as a director and the movie’s source in a novel, I have to assume that every twist in the relatively slow-paced drama had a purpose, but the film left me scratching my head with the following questions: What turned Phil from the meanest, nastiest character in recent film into a […]
A haunting film, with Kodi Smit-McPhee as the spectral Peter, Benedict Cumberbatch as the half-crazy Phil and Kirsten Dunst as the drunken and lost Rose. Jesse Plemons plays Phil’s appropriately bovine brother George, wandering aimlessly outside the action. The superb cinematography, featuring beautifully empty New Zealand landscapes, made me wish, as with Nomadland last year, that […]
Good music and a clever production – at one point a musical within a musical within a musical – marred mainly by an annoyingly frenetic Andrew Garfield in the lead. For the first half hour I feared I was back In the Heights, but the movie slowly grew on me and charmed me by the end, […]
A strange black-and-white, in every sense, picture of the 1930s, with a lack of subtlety and artistry mimicking films in the ’30s – was that intentional? Tessa Thompson’s character was nervous every minute – and she was in every minute – striking a Hitchcockian note that eclipsed whatever social point may have been intended.
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