A hysterical drama of little historical import, featuring lush scenery, gorgeous costumes and three actors at the top of their games: Emma Stone, Olivia Coleman and Rachel Weisz. Unfortunately, the characters they play aren’t very nice and they get progressively more unpleasant as the story unfolds, leaving one with no one to root for or […]
Better than Ocean’s Eight, but not by much, this female heist movie had improbabilities piled on implausibilities, with enough loose threads to make a mitten. Viola Davis and Liam Neeson seemed an unlikely pair from the get-go (with Neeson overexposed in the trailers before the show), but the idea that the other widows would go […]
Unwatchable. Director Julian Schnabel gives us a portrait not of an artist, always hard to do, but of a tortured soul. In the name of art, his art not van Gogh’s, he uses a hand-held camera, bounces between French and English, repeats voice-over dialogue and shoots a lot of scenes ostensibly through Vincent’s eyes. But […]
The “feel-good” movie of the year, with scene after scene of the good guys standing up to the bigots, one great song after another filling the soundtrack, and an almost entire cast of characters the modern, educated audience could feel superior to. Danish-American Viggo Mortenson was splendid as the minor Mafioso Tony Lip and Linda […]
Alfonso Cuaron’s paean to his childhood nanny in 1971 black-and-white made me think, for different reasons, of The Bicycle Thief and Proust’s Francoise, but it clearly meant more to him than to me. I kept waiting for something to happen, and when I realized that wasn’t the point, it was too late. I was more […]
A fascinating look at recent political history, turning on the question whether a candidate’s “zipper problem” should outweigh the substantive benefits he could provide the country. Of course, the question seems a bit quaint and dated, given the personal foibles of our current president, but it was certainly alive a decade later when Ken Starr […]
If you’re an opera fan – or, better, a Maria Callas devotee – there’s plenty here to savor: biography, interviews, soaring music and endless views of La Diva. If you’re not, there’s a lot of scratchy recordings, pictures of Maria getting into limousines and out of airplanes, old newsreel-style clips and not much insight into […]
There’s only one Coen Brothers – well, actually, there are two of them, but their vision is singular and unique. They are also masters of the craft of filmmaking; you feel they can do whatever they want, and you luxuriate in the experience. For the Coens, violence is an art, genres are meant to be […]
The dramatized story of a foreign correspondent who is neurotic, alcoholic, charmless and a chain-smoker, who injects herself into stories and cares more about the people whose “stories” she tells than the people in her life. And to what end? For her own fame? For the glory of her newspaper? Surely not to alleviate suffering […]
I give this a zero for originality and a 100 for hitting all the right chords, and when the chords in question are booming ’80s arena-rock anthems by Queen, you’ve got a head start on a really fun movie. It’s also a feel-good movie, despite the difficult private life and AIDS-related death of the lead […]
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