What an intelligent film! What acting! And how daring – to base a film on the life of a living person, and the Pope, no less! I’m not a Catholic, but the spectacle of cardinals in robes, the scale of the Vatican and Castel Gondolfo, and the power and beauty of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel were […]
For a welcome change, a red-blooded bromance, mavericks-against-the-establishment, Americans-vs.-Italians action drama, made memorable by the protean Christian Bale’s portrayal of race driver Ken Miles. Matt Damon is solidly good, as he always is, and the rest of the supporting cast is almost as fun to watch. My only quibble – and in such a long […]
Not having read the book, I first struggled to identify the four sisters, then I continued to struggle with Greta Gerwig’s constant cutting between “seven years earlier” and the present. Then I had to adjust to the semi-saccharine tone of the girls (with the occasional exception of nasty little sister Amy), the mother, and the […]
Sorry, I know I’m supposed to feel warmhearted about Harriet Tubman’s story, but the movie left me cold. First, the characters were too, pardon the expression, black-and-white. Second, Cynthia Erivo may have looked like Tubman but was neither inspired nor inspiring enough to convince me. The two supposedly rousing speeches she gave, to abolitionists in […]
Despite theoretically compressing 18 non-stop hours into a two-hour film, the pace was so slow that I kept overanalyzing the absurd story. Yes, war is senseless, but if 1,200 lives are at stake, can’t you do better than send a total greenhorn and whomever he chooses off on a horrendously challenging rescue mission? And why […]
Enough already of movies about losers, fathers as bullies and situations that make you scream, just leave, for Pete’s sake. If I want to be miserable I can read the New York Times, I don’t need to spend two hours in a movie theater. The film’s structure resembled Pain and Glory, but that may be […]
This is the third “whistleblower” film I’ve seen this week. Whereas the first two – The —Report” and “Dark Water” – were unremittingly serious, Laundromat is a comedy, with Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas hamming it up as Mossack and Fonseca, name partners of the Panama City law firm recently exposed for its tax-evasion and money laundering (hence the […]
Mark Ruffalo reprises his role from Spotlight, except this time it’s just him. Although “based on a true story,” or at least a magazine article, it seemed so unlikely that a brand new partner would take on this case just because the plaintiff knew his “Grammer,” and even more impossible that he could conduct the research, […]
More important as a sociological statement than a movie Queen & Slim was ripped from the headlines of white police abusing blacks, and the odds stacked against blacks in that situation. Daniel Kaluuya was as wonderful as he was in Get Out, and his relationship with Jodie Turner-Smith was original and charming. Their encounter with […]
What was interesting about Marriage Story was the relationship between Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, two of my favorite actors. The attraction was clear, but so was the inevitable conflict. You didn’t see one as right, the other wrong; or one good, the other bad. You saw two individuals – fortunately, talented – who each needed, or […]
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