A sick movie about sick people – specifically, Indonesian gangsters who killed wantonly in 1965 and are now willing to make a movie about it. It’s hard to feel bad for mass murderers, but it is fairly clear they are being manipulated by director Joshua Oppenheimer, who must know that his subjects are making fools […]
Lots of cute moments, most supplied by Sam Rockwell as the cool-dude amusement park assistant manager (although technically he didn’t seem to be managing anything, no one else was, either). The limp 14-year-old dealing with parents and girls is a tried-and-true trope, and it didn’t fail here, but the story otherwise never rose above the […]
Moral of the movie: don’t move into a haunted house. Backup advice: once in a haunted house, move out as fast as you can. The pseudoscientific demonologists, especially the lovely Vera Farmiga, added a nice touch to the otherwise plebeian story, but I lost track of the various daughters and the opportunity to make something […]
A “fun-fun-fun” movie with great music and genuinely heartwarming cameos by Bruce Springsteen, Sting, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder and Mick Jagger. Although nominally about them, the backup singers Darlene Love, Lisa Fischer, Claudia Kennear, et al., somehow remained in the background. I couldn’t figure out if the movie had a “point” – how someone becomes […]
What I found incredible were Brad Pitt’s initially rejecting the request that he help save mankind and the Israelis’ letting all comers, including Palestinians, into their secure compound. By comparison, I found the zombies quite believable – frighteningly so – and the discovery of how to combat them quite brilliant. (Well, okay, maybe Brad’s successful […]
It all comes down to how much you enjoy the company of Greta Gerwig, and I found her quite pleasant. She is sufficiently attractive to be pleasant on the eyes, but not such a looker that she can’t play an “undatable.” Her insecurity and attempts to cope with her shortcomings are generally endearing, as we […]
Not since My Dinner With Andre have I watched two such uninteresting characters talk so self-indulgently, often in complete paragraphs, to so little purpose. Julie Delpy came across as real, albeit neurotic, but Ethan Hawke was unconvincing as a novelist, as an expatriate, and certainly as a dad. When you watch a young couple courting, […]
What is it with cigarettes and movies? Although smoking has not been a part of “the world I live in” for 40 years or more, 80% of the movies I see have a scene with a character who lights up. Is this the only way to tell us we are in the 1950s, or that […]
Compellingly strange or strangely compelling, this Mexican film at the Walker Art Center was like a puzzle without an answer that was still fun to do. Just as all paintings needn’t be realistic, not all movies need to make narrative sense. Here, one discrete scene followed another – some were past, some present, some imaginary […]
The power and brilliance of Shakespeare has never, for me, shone more brightly than in this semi-documentary of a prison production of Julias Caesar. Italian criminals brought a peculiar resonance to the depiction of Roman senators, and the fact that they looked like people I know (Richard Blake as Cassius?) made the message even more […]
© Copyright 2019 Robert Marshall | All Rights Reserved.