An overlong, pointless documentary about two aged former film stars – Grey Gardens, anyone? – that is ultimately dispiriting, especially as one of the former film stars, Carrie Fisher, is the daughter of the other. Debbie Reynolds, America’s Sweetheart in the ’50s, is still performing, sort of, on the geriatric circuit; whereas Carrie, famous as […]
It won’t do to compare this 1953 thriller to current movies, but, much as Elevator to the Gallows showed us, it can be tremendously fun to watch well-crafted old movies on the big screen. Director Henry Hathaway showed more than a touch of Hitchcock with his visual clues, but what set him apart was his use […]
A by-the-book sports movie, with no story-arc cliche left unexplored, made interesting and eminently watchable because of its (purported) setting: the slums of Kampala, Uganda. I couldn’t help think of the current hurricane-induced tragedy in Haiti as I watched Phiona’s family evicted from their one room, then washed by a flash flood. Seeing humans triumph […]
Sully, Everest (which I watched on the plane the day before), Patriots Day (for which I saw the trailer) and Deepwater Horizon – there seems to be a trend to dramatize recent real-life tragedies, and the formula is becoming somewhat predictable. There’s the Everyman in the lead – a guy just doing his job, albeit a rather specialized job […]
Greg Kinnear plays the fumbling father, Jennifer Ehle plays Laura Linney and Paulina Garcia plays the more challenging role (thus, the cigarette smoking) of the dress store owner seeking to avoid eviction by the yuppie couple moving into the Brooklyn brownstone that houses her boutique. The core of Ira Sachs’s movie, though, is the sons, […]
This was a feature-length cartoon put on by, as Mad Magazine used to boast, “the usual gang of idiots” – in this case, Seth Rogen, Josh Hill, Bill Hader, James Franco, Kristen Wiig, Paul Rudd, etc., etc. The conceit was cute, the jokes and language prurient, but there wasn’t much more here than in an […]
A well-made movie about real people just doing their jobs – how rare and how nice! And oh, I cried the whole time, so there was plenty of drama and heroism. All along the way Clint Eastwood interjected tertiary characters in a way that humanized the story even more and added a light, often comic […]
This film was doubly remarkable: 1) it based an adventure/crime thriller on an IPO; and 2) all the protagonists were women. Alysia Reiner was a more appealing Assistant U.S. Attorney than Anna Gunn’s investment banker, but both made more sense than Sarah Megan Thomas, whose role needed more filling out to be understandable. The men were […]
A wonderfully moody feature debut by the great Louis Malle from 1958, filmed in black-and-white – mostly black – with a perfectly adapted score by Miles Davis and sultry performances by Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet. The Hitchcockian tension begins with the opening shot and never lets up; the plot unfolds like a textbook tragedy […]
This film takes place in the same country for old men made familiar by the Coen brothers’ classic, with a jowly Jeff Bridges reprising the role previously played by Tommy Lee Jones. Much less happens here, and that is the movie’s other strength – i.e., besides the gorgeously banal West Texas setting – its remarkable […]
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