I look on this as a mood piece with a riveting score, maybe an homage to the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, with Benicio del Toro in the Javier Bardem role. Or it could be a domestic analogue to Zero Dark Thirty, with torture and extra-legal black ops producing the assassination of the Mexican drug kingpin. […]
How can you not root for Matt Damon – our generation’s Jimmy Stewart, as one critic said – as he struggles to survive for years all alone on Mars? And how can you not root for Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mackenzie Davis back in Houston. (Jeff Daniels is the resident prig, but how bad […]
A delightful road trip down to New Orleans with Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn, portraying, respectively, a natural winner and a born loser. The ending was not exactly what the story set us up for, but I won’t complain about a little fantasy. For all the gritty shots of Iowa, St. Louis and Memphis, this […]
Not a lot of “up” moments (any?) in this tale of unscrupulous real estate dealings in an overextended Florida housing market. Michael Shannon offered a deal with the devil and Andrew Garfield took it. The drama may have exaggerated the reality, but the knowledge that thousands of people lost their homes in the actual crisis […]
Maybe if I hadn’t seen the excellent documentary, Bobby Fischer Against the World, I would have found something of interest in this recounting of the Fischer-Spassky chess championship. As it is, I found the characters cliches, drama lacking and the whole thing rather pointless.
Just when you thought you’d seen an amazing movie about three “professional climbers” (whatever they are) almost making it to the top of the previously unscaled Himalayan peak known as “Meru,” only to be foiled by bad weather, lack of food and frozen toes, you found out that – oh, no! – they’re going to […]
There are amazing stories in the life of Steve Jobs: how two kids in a garage took on one of the world’s most powerful companies, IBM, and came out on top; how Steve Jobs, after getting fired, came back to Apple and returned it from near-bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world; how […]
The adorable Greta Gerwig in a madcap farce from Noah Baumbach – much better than While We’re Young – reminded me of the younger Woody Allen’s movies: a charming female lead, New York locations, oddball secondary characters and real-life situations that seem real but probably occur more often in the movies. Lola Kirke is the grounded one, […]
“I had sex today,” announces 15-year-old Minnie in the opening scene, and that’s pretty much all that happens. When we learn that the sex was with her mother’s slacker boyfriend, a certain uneasiness, not to mention creepiness, sets in, but even then the ultimate explosion we see coming is rather muted. Kristen Wiig is wonderful […]
I haven’t read Infinite Jest – although now I want to – and I know nothing about David Foster Wallace, but Jason Segel did about as good a job of creating a real person out of a historical figure as I can remember. Jesse Eisenberg was brilliant, too, as a youngish reporter unable to separate an […]
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