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 […]
Two hours of my life I won’t get back, or more appropriately, two hours I could have spent more profitably surfing the web. Werner Herzog’s subtitled “Reveries of the Connected World” was a bunch of “reveries,” all right, but there wasn’t much connection. Herzog is one of my all-time favorite directors, and his sense of […]
A sweet love story, depending entirely on your view of Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart. Unlike classic Woody Allen, the ancillary characters were ciphers and the jokes few and far between. The period clothes, settings and music, of course were impeccable. I have always been infatuated with Kristen Stewart, and she’s never been more seductive, […]
Second movie in a row about people living in the bush, although this one took itself more seriously, which was a mistake, because on a serious level this film was absurd. The children were engaging, and the movie moved briskly enough, as we never knew what was coming next, which was partly because nothing made […]
Sort of a Revenant Lite, with a wild pig instead of a bear and a fat 13-year-old instead of Leo DiCaprio. How could you not be charmed, though, by chubby Ricky Baker, a budding juvenile delinquent who runs away cluelessly into the New Zealand outback, where the redoubtable Sam Neill grudgingly tolerates him, then grows fond. […]
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