Entries by Bob Marshall

Tangerine – 8

Yo, bitch, whatcha doin’ in my movie! Chasing Chester, not waiting for Godot, not waiting for anyone. Great characters and gritty streets – L.A. like you’ve never seen it, nor want to: “City of Stars Bail Bonds” being a typical background sign. All roads lead to Donut Time, and at the film’s climax all the […]

Inside Out – 5

To its credit, I was able to sit through the whole movie (having nowhere else to go), and it was clearly much better than all the animated trailers that preceded it (and I count Pan in that category). It was clever in concept – that is, positing five emotions as drivers of how we feel […]

Number One Fan (Elle L’Adore) – 8

An attractive but slightly loony fan of singer Vincent Lacroix is asked, as a favor, to dispose of his girlfriend’s body and then, as a result, is treated as a murder suspect. Meanwhile, the police team investigating the disappearance is having their own, typically French, problems. Lives are hanging in the balance, but it’s not really […]

Trainwreck – 7.9

This Judd Apatow-Amy Schumer flick featured every cliche in the rom-com book, but hey, it’s a pretty good book! I laughed pretty much the whole way through every silly scene, enjoying the company of all the characters, from Bill Hader and Tilda Swinton to Brie Larson to LeBron James and Chrissie Evert. The reviews I’ve […]

Amy – 8

An awfully good documentary about Amy Winehouse on several levels. It captured her art. It captured her tortured personal life. Other than her mother, it showed us all the important people around her, bad and good. It told her story, pretty much from beginning to end. Going in, I knew her name. Leaving, I felt […]

Spy – 6

Allison Janney adds gravitas to any role, and I felt grounded whenever her deputy director of the CIA was onscreen. Not so much everyone else, but Jason Statham and Miranda Hart were perfect hoots and Rose Byrne was utterly gorgeous. Of course, it was Melissa McCarthy’s movie, which was both a strength and weakness: you […]

Testament of Youth – 6.5

It seems harsh to be critical of a movie that is all about women’s rights, noble sacrifices, death and the pointless horrors of World War I and has a nice British cast and period costumes, but I got the feeling this should have been a one-hour TV show, rather than a two-hour movie. Alicia Vikander […]

Love and Mercy – 7

I’m not sure this movie would be of interest or make sense to anyone who hasn’t followed Brian Wilson’s career, but that’s still a pretty big market. And even for those like me who have been fans forever, the movie left some pretty big holes – like how he came under the control of his […]

Broadway 2015

We have spent five weeks in New York going more to the theater than movies – especially since we were shut out of the Apu Trilogy on Memorial Day – so I thought I could use this space for a brief recap of what we’ve seen on the boards in a variety of venues: Broadway, […]