Another exercise in style from producer Ridley Scott – not as extreme as The Counselor, but in the same vein. Our hero, played by Christian Bale, was the personification of Good: we didn’t see him reading to blind children in his spare time only because, between working two shifts in the steel mill, tending his […]
I caught up with two movies that had escaped me when I flew to and from New York after Thanksgiving. Both were fine airplane movies, largely because they had subjects of inherent interest to me: fracking and rock’n’roll. The former featured star turns by Matt Damon and Frances McDormand, excellent as always, and nice support […]
A remarkable film that involved me intellectually and emotionally from start to finish. Director Paul Greengrass set up an equality between the American captain and the Somali pirate at the outset, by showing both men leaving family and embarking on their collision course. Muse, in an Oscar-worthy supporting role, was never a bad guy: every […]
A sweet film about one spunky girl’s efforts to break through the repression of women in Saudi Arabia. By making her statement an attempt to acquire, and ride, a bicycle, the director kept the rebellion personal, low-key, understandable and touching. And by making the repressers women, not men, there weren’t villains to root against, just […]
Potent, powerful, punishing – it is hard to imagine a film that could better capture the human misery of slavery in America. Everyone acts their appointed role in this tableau, although I didn’t quite understand what Brad Pitt was doing on the scene. Once the black man is considered chattel, rather than humanity, all else […]
Swann in Love is a minutely detailed account of a love affair, focusing entirely on Swann’s feelings, day by day, every moment of longing, pleasure, and above all, jealousy. Nothing really happens; there is no climax or denouement; it is just a portrait, of Swann in love, and how that love affects and changes him. […]
After five years of faithful attendance at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival I am prepared to let it pass me by this year. Part of the reason is the lackluster quality of the films I have seen the last two years. For several years, festival entries dotted, and even topped, my Top Ten lists; […]
I felt I was wallowing in a Vogue feature, every shot was oh-so-glamorous – and just as artificial. Nothing in the story computed, however. The “Counselor” was a cipher: there was no clue why Penelope Cruz loved him, why Javier Bardem or Brad Pitt befriended him, what he was doing in the movie or where […]
A feeling of weightlessness, enhanced by my 3-D glasses, set in with George and Sandra’s first roll in space and remained the identifyingly unique feature of this otherwise generally weightless survival story. Actually, the less said about the story itself, the better. Somehow, Sandra Bullock’s character changes from a somewhat incompetent space traveler who crashed […]
A movie director’s first obligation to his audience is to provide appealing, or at least interesting, characters. Not far down the list, however, is providing dialogue that the audience can understand. I don’t want to sit there thinking, what did he say? – even if, as in this movie, it probably doesn’t matter. (If I […]
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