1. Eye in the Sky. This film about a drone strike in the Mideast gave me more to think and write about than any other and courageously tackled a controversial matter of foreign policy. (Kudos, also, to the similarly overlooked Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.)
Why? What was the point? Natalie Portman didn’t look like Jackie – not as pretty, nowhere near the presence – and we were given her at her most insecure, at her most vulnerable. No American who lived through “Camelot” could have directed such a picture, and you wonder why Pablo Larrain – much more at […]
Matching Hell and High Water in regional atmosphere, Manchester reverberated more closely to home for me, recalling Mystic River and Dennis Lehane novels, Spartina and the whole ball of Matt Damon/Ben Affleck/Mark Wahlberg New England wax – not surprising, as Damon was a producer and Ben’s little brother Casey was the star. I’ve loved watching Casey since Gone, Baby, Gone, and he […]
Hokey and manipulative, plus cursed by that bane of bad plots, “based on a true story.” Why did Saroo have an adopted brother? Why did Nicole Kidman have such an awful hairdo? Neither helped the movie, but both were based on the true story. Dev Patel’s matinee-idol looks, of course, weren’t based on the truth; they […]
A poem of a film, with a fat Communist in the lead and a wispy Gael Bernal Garcia as foil and narrator. By constantly using backlighting, director Pablo Larrain conveys the mood and spirit of the 1940s and half the fun is experiencing the people, politics and costumes of that era in Chile (when the […]
A twisted story with neat directorial touches in every nook and cranny. Every character was driven by sex – and that means “every,” major or minor, old or young. While that may not have seemed totally realistic, it did seem, well, French. Whereas many thrillers fall apart when viewed in retrospect, the more I thought […]
A powerful drama, lifted almost intact from the stage. This seemed a problem at first – the staginess of all the action transpiring on the backyard lot, the declamations in place of conversation – but the sheer humanity of the characters, and their problems, won us over. When Denzel Washington defended his affair by saying, […]
A cotton candy confection of a film: pretty, sweet, airy, but not much there. Rather than playing real people, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling seemed to be playing Debbie Reynolds and Gene Kelly, or Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. The film embraced its derivative core in such meta moments as the characters’ dream dance sequence […]
Two-thirds a good movie, as I thought we were witnessing, Rashomon-like, two different views of the same events, a chamber piece told with Asian elegance and stunning beauty. Then came chapter three, which took the beauty and trashed it, removing the mystery as well as one character’s fingers. The plot that played out made less […]
The election of Donald Trump has infected so much of my outlook it is not surprising that it dampened my enthusiasm for Loving, which would otherwise have been a hopeful, inspiring story of two regular people and a couple of young ACLU lawyers bringing down Virginia’s hateful anti-miscegenation law. Just look at how backward and racist […]
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