A formulaic comedy about four old friends reuniting for a weekend on the town – in this case, EssenceFest in New Orleans – made fresh by starring four black women in an almost all-black setting, with one goofy and one out-of-it white woman as comic relief. Regina Hall was engaging as the woman who has […]
A group of French filmmakers sought to counter the despair provoked by climate change and the ongoing Sixth Extinction by finding examples that show how the world could survive in a better, sustainable way – sort of a filmic version of John Lennon’s Imagine. I can’t say it was convincing – more on that in […]
Dunkirk is an unpleasant assault on the senses, the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan stretched out for two hours. We see death by suicide, by being shot in the back, burned at sea, strafed from the air, blown up on the sand, drowned in vessel hold, shot from the sky, machine-gunned at close range, […]
Every summer needs a fun and innocent rom-com, and The Big Sick is it for 2017, with the crazily adorable Zoe Kazan filling the Julia Roberts/Meg Ryan role. The more recognizable Ray Romano and Holly Hunter are idiosyncratically good as Emily’s parents, while the Pakistani family of Kumail (who plays himself!) is just as enjoyable […]
This documentary tackled a fascinating subject – water rights in California – but left me with more questions than answers. It approached the topic from several different angles but never tied them together. The people of East Porterville had no running water for three years. Something called the Monterey Amendments set water allocations behind closed […]
A movie about a plucky woman in wartime Britain making a movie about a plucky woman in wartime Britain, graced with the ever-pleasant figures of Bill Nighy and Gemma Arterton. The period details seemed just right, as was the mixture of wartime horror and cinema fantasy.
This seems to be the buzz-generator of early summer, but that speaks more to the paucity of good movies than BD’s merits. Anson Elgort’s moves and cool are appealing, and Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm are wonderfully scary bad guys, but that’s about it. The soundtrack is loud and unrelenting but doesn’t make much sense, […]
Fine acting by Salma Hayek and John Lithgow overcame a shaky plot premise to let us enjoy a roundelay of cleverly caricatured dinner guests. It is easy to read the movie as a parable of Democratic versus Republican values with an unfortunate ending, but the pleasures along the way were smaller, like hearing what cocktails […]
Silly fun, marred for me by a climactic battle that was befuddling, overlong and beyond absurd. Until then I could enjoy the comic-book characters, especially Chris Pine, and the cinematically familiar settings of World War I trenches, British cabinet meetings and German evil. Gal Gadot got better-looking as the movie progressed, which was good because […]
A feminine thriller in full Southern Gothic mode, Sofia Coppola turns the cinematic tables with an almost all-female cast lusting in their separate ways for the hunky Union soldier dropped into their laps. Calling it a period piece is an understatement, as Coppola pulls out the beautiful dresses, the dripping Spanish moss, the candlelit chandeliers […]
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