The story, and the telling, were too pat for a documentary: more often than not, it seemed like scenes were being staged for the camera, rather than that the camera happened to be there. The affectlessness of Aishorplan, the 13-year starlet, didn’t add to the convincing. But I can never get too much of those […]
Certainly an interesting movie covering a subject not often seen in movies and brand-new actors, but it was long and slow and not a lot of fun to watch. The main character(s) were quiet, repressed, not attractive in physical appearance or choice of lifestyle (i.e., drug-dealing). There wasn’t much of a story – just three […]
Hard to believe, after Inglorious Basterds, that someone else would cast Brad Pitt as an American (ok, Canadian) who could pass himself off as a Frenchman/German behind German lines. Any relationship between his French accent and that of the Parisian he was supposed to be was entirely coincidental. Of course, he was no more convincing as […]
The sci-fi stuff was not that interesting, and the fights of fancy were absurd excesses of computer cinematography, but Benedict Cumberbatch was superb in a role he was born to play: arrogant but funny.
If I’m going to sit through a long, boring movie I want it to at least have a central character I like, or at least enjoy looking at. Here, by contrast, the focal figure, Dona Clara (played by Sonia Braga), was the least attractive person on view: stubborn, haughty, insensitive, selfish, living lazily on her […]
A thoughtful, very real examination of guilt, confession and community responsibility from the Belgian masters, the Dardennes brothers. Star Adele Haenel was onscreen the entire time, and I never tired of watching her. The plot toyed with that of a policier, which the directors said they wanted to avoid, but that’s what drove the action and […]
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 […]
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