A worthy sequel to Rivers and Tides, although its novelty and relative innocence made that one more memorable. Andy Goldsworthy’s art subverts nature as much as celebrates it, but when he connects it’s a home run. I would have appreciated more art and fewer extended close-ups of the artist; the appearance of his attractive daughter […]
An Absurdist take on Soviet history that left us wondering, Is this the worst movie we will see this year? We expected funny, but it never showed up. Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev was absurd, of course, but to what point? Making a farce out of executions in a police state makes for queasy viewing, and […]
1. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, MissouriEvery line of Martin McDonagh’s dialogue is fraught and measured, delivered to perfection by Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson and an equally adept supporting cast.
A psychological thriller with Daniel Day-Lewis, a lover and a sister all vying for dominance while his dressmaking art that makes it all possible teeters in the balance. At first I wondered, why make a movie about the Day-Lewis character, except to show off his nonpareil acting skills. What a comedown is Reynolds Woodcock from […]
A skillfully made film that affirms one great value after another: the First Amendment, women’s equality, art over commerce, truth to power and on and on. The trouble is the movie is continually running up against history we know well, raising questions: wasn’t the Post’s story merely a sideshow to the New York Times’s? Not […]
Very hard to watch but a remarkable movie, telling parallel stories of a white family and a black family, coping, struggling in 1940s Mississippi. Life can be very hard (I was reminded of my grandmother’s eking out a living on her farm in West Memphis during the Depression), life can be unfair, and there is […]
A completely charming film by the master director Guillermo del Toro: every scene, every shot had visual beauty and plot significance. The caricature of 1950s America was comically dead-on, but not distracting – notably, Michael Shannon’s Dick and Jane family and Richard Jenkins’s Norman Rockwell art. Shannon was wonderfully evil, Octavia Spencer provided her usual […]
James Ivory’s gay wet dream goes from languorous to tedious about halfway through: how many slow-motion man-boy embraces do we need, or “let’s strip to our trunks and go for a swim”? (I subsequently read of screenwriter Ivory’s disappointment that both male stars had a no-nudity provision in their contracts.) More annoying were the unconvincing […]
What a nice companion to Dunkirk and The Crown, a view behind the scenes of what Churchill was going through in the days between his ascension to Prime Minister and the desperate evacuation of British troops from France. The portrait of Churchill doesn’t comport with the public view we’ve been given: here is generally disheveled, […]
After 25 minutes (!) of previews for movies we will never see, involving sci-fi or cartoon creatures and lots of noise and violence, we returned to the galaxy far, far away for a very tired story featuring very tired actors – e.g., Carrie Fisher and Mark Hammill – and the new generation, all of whom […]
© Copyright 2019 Robert Marshall | All Rights Reserved.