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. […]
The story is better than the storytelling. How many people do we need to hear saying, “I can’t comment,” in order to grasp that a virus to destabilize Iran’s nuclear program is a state secret, an obvious fact to begin with. Then there is the problem of how to film computer code, which supplies the […]
A summer piffle – watchable mainly because it was French. Nothing was believable, or terribly charming, if that was the justification. Two young boys on an adventure, but it didn’t make us care about them or identify with any of their experiences. How much better was Mud, for example.
For me, this was too much of the same thing. It was beautifully shot – one of those films you remember as black-and-white, even though it was in color, with every other shot framed like a painting, a Vermeer or Hammershoi or Tooker. The lead actress was easy on the eyes, but the nuns all […]
I was left totally blank – which, not coincidentally, was the main character’s only expression – by this story of an older dental technician in Caracas who picks up young men for his sexually deviate purposes and doesn’t mind being beaten up, rejected and exploited. Then at the end he maybe manipulates his young charge […]
Just as art can be abstract or surrealistic as well as realistic, there’s no reason a movie can’t deviate from realism into an alternate world such as this, where people are not allowed to remain single and if they do not remarry in 45 days will be transformed into an animal of their choice. (Isn’t […]
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