The King. Of all the movies I saw, this is the one I would be happiest to watch again. It featured a bunch of interesting musical acts, an acute commentary on our society and, of course, Elvis. It was less a documentary than an essay, like nothing I had ever seen.
A tremendously powerful film about a 12-year-old street urchin in Lebanon who alternately games the system and is thwarted by it. The depiction of Arab street life might be hard to take for the unfamiliar viewer, but resonated with my North African Peace Corps memories. The plight of the refugee woman and son, not to […]
It would be good to know that a certain critic’s taste coincided with your own, especially if that critic were on The New York Times, which is my primary source of movie information. One easy test of this came this weekend, when the Times printed an Oscars section in which their two chief critics, A.O. […]
Beale Street is a long, slow street we’re asked to walk, without a happy end in sight. There is one scene that crackles, when the future in-laws come over to hear the news, but if that record plays at 78, the rest is 33-1/3. The two lead actors are bland in their goodness, and the […]
Watching this, I was two-thirds ashamed to be an American, with our recent history running from Richard Nixon through the phony justifications of the Iraq invasion, but one-third proud to live in a culture that could produce such a clever, popular takedown of a living public figure. Some caricatures misfired – especially Steve Carrell’s Donald […]
A meditation on family, Shoplifters also hits home as a reflection on what counts as progress in Japanese society since Yasujiro Ozu’s very similar films in the 1950s. Most obvious is the style of filmmaker Kore-eda, shooting from tatami-level. Then there is the plot of everyday family matters, one vignette of daily life after another […]
The opening ten minutes was a bracingly, convincingly staged school shooting and aftermath that gave me hope for an original, relevant film. The pre-Natalie Portman Celeste character then sings her original song in response to the terror, it goes You-Tube viral and the film collapses into cliche and the movie version of life. Her song […]
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 […]
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