This New York Times “Critics Pick” allegedly ” seesaws between comedy and horror,” but being neither funny nor scary, what is left? A cartoonish battle between an icy abuser of senior citizens and a Russian mafioso who exploits mules to traffic drugs. Do we care who wins or survives? Not really. There could be a […]
Another Round Being the Ricardos Belfast Bergman Island Better Days Black Bear C’mon C’mon CODA Cry Macho David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet The Dig Don’t Look Up Drive My Car The Electrical World of Louis Wain The Forty-Year-Old Version The French Dispatch Hand of God A Hero Herself I Care A Lot I’m […]
Crash. I liked the characters, the interlocking stories, the comments on race relations , but best of all – especially for a Hollywood movie – was the moral complexity:
1.Amal. So far as I know, this was never commercially released, but it was my favorite film from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Set in a very real India (not the heightened India of Slumdog)
No Country for Old Men. For what it was, this was perfection, and what it was was quite something. Each scene was a stunning set piece, and built momentum to the next. Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin gave Oscar-worthy performances,
There was nothing new here and the presentation got repetitive. On the other hand, it is always instructive to see archival footage of the civil rights movement and to recognize, however bad matters today may be, just how far our country has come. Another way to put it is, it’s shocking to see how bad […]
This was a well-made dramatic reenactment of a little known chapter in the book of the FBI’s corrupt oppression of black leaders in the ’60s, a period we’ve visited in other recent films: Chicago 7, MLK/FBI, One Night in Miami. It didn’t, at least for me, go much below the surface. There was no ambiguity […]
I spent the whole movie wondering where it was going, and at the end I still didn’t know. Were we supposed to be impressed by how Ruben, the heavy metal drummer, was handling his deafness, or depressed? Was he courageous or reckless? It seemed, by the last shot, that he had thrown everything away, but […]
A very brave movie, in that it confirmed, indeed celebrated, all my negative stereotypes about India and Indians: corrupt, servile, class-bigoted and dirty, for starters. Politics and religion don’t come off much better. Nor does the movie sugarcoat anything with a happy ending. Our star, “the white tiger,” rises to the top by murdering his […]
It must be hard to make a dramatically interesting movie about archaeology, based on the evidence of The Dig. To keep things moving, the writers threw in an unrelated plane crash, a love affair between the mousy bride of a gay archaeologist and the proprietor’s dashing cousin, a buffoonish museum curator and the rapidly approaching death […]
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