A cotton candy confection of a film: pretty, sweet, airy, but not much there. Rather than playing real people, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling seemed to be playing Debbie Reynolds and Gene Kelly, or Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. The film embraced its derivative core in such meta moments as the characters’ dream dance sequence […]
Two-thirds a good movie, as I thought we were witnessing, Rashomon-like, two different views of the same events, a chamber piece told with Asian elegance and stunning beauty. Then came chapter three, which took the beauty and trashed it, removing the mystery as well as one character’s fingers. The plot that played out made less […]
The election of Donald Trump has infected so much of my outlook it is not surprising that it dampened my enthusiasm for Loving, which would otherwise have been a hopeful, inspiring story of two regular people and a couple of young ACLU lawyers bringing down Virginia’s hateful anti-miscegenation law. Just look at how backward and racist […]
The whole movie begs for explanations and answers: who are these aliens, what do they want, how do they communicate, how will humans understand them, and can humans cooperate when faced with a crisis? It is, therefore, a bit of a disappointment when none of these questions are satisfactorily answered – not that there could […]
Good fun to be reminded of Toshiro Mifune’s roles, especially in Kurosawa classics, and get some sense of what made him a star. Otherwise, there was nothing particularly compelling or unique about this documentary.
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 […]
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