What a relief, after seeing a trio of heavy, intellectual films at the New York Film Festival, to watch a thoroughly enjoyable, funny and teary, battle in which almost everyone is a winner, above all Billie Jean King. The movie is more about her complicated love life than her tennis, but there is enough historic […]
The artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is the hole at the middle of this documentary: we never hear his voice, don’t see his paintings, learn nothing of his background, and catch only fleeting glimpses of his face. Instead, we get talking heads remembering the days when he emerged on the Lower East Side scene. What the film […]
Sort of a cross between Last Year at Marienbad and Aguirre, Wrath of God, this Argentine period drama offered memorable still images – loved that tricorner hat! – but not much continuity or sensible plot. Life was pretty crummy in Spanish South America, and I was happy to have a shower afterward. A bit of […]
An intense two hours of close-ups of a bewildered Jennifer Lawrence’s face, as she copes with a haunted house and situations beyond her control. It’s not a movie that makes much sense, but neither does a Hieronymous Bosch altarpiece. Javier Bardem is only slightly nicer than he was in No Country for Old Men, but […]
Although this film takes place in Baltimore, it might as well be another country, so foreign to my personal experience is the world it shows, starting with sport? competition? of “step,” which is sort of like synchronized swimmng on land. This is one of those heartwarming documentaries that gets lucky, as we follow a group […]
If you think the West Texas of Hell or High Water was bleak, wait until you see Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation in Taylor Sheridan’s follow-up film. Not only is it bleak topographically, economically and psychologically, we see it in the depth of winter, with snow blanketing all signs of life. But bleak can be […]
Preaching to the choir, or more like droning to the choir, Al Gore is a plodding, un-nuanced presence to spend two hours with. The early scenes of global warming’s effects are bracing, but they are never really put in context and quickly give way to the former Vice President’s leadership training seminars. Shots of the […]
A totally fun movie, filled with colorful characters and a believably silly heist plot. It’s never clear whether we’re laughing at or with the good-old-boys of the NASCAR world. The fact that they get away with their robbery and nobody gets hurt suggests that Director Steven Soderbergh didn’t mean to insult; the movie’s lack of […]
Not a fun movie. In the first part you feel you are in the middle of Detroit’s 1967 race riot. In the next, you are held captive in the Algiers Hotel Annex as a trio of white policemen brutalize a random group of blacks, and two white girls. Then, in almost a coda, you see […]
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 […]
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