Skeleton Twins – 7
Wonderful acting by Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig conveys the closeness of twins. Everyday nature of the story was refreshing, but it also meant plot ran out of steam well before the ending. Still, a fine effort.
Author Archive for: Bob Marshall
Entries by Bob Marshall
Gone Girl – 7
The movie delivered on the book’s strengths – original plot, interesting characters – as well as its weakness – a frustratingly unsatisfying ending. It’s hard to know how someone who hadn’t read the book would have been affected by the plot twists and turns; for us, we watched and mentally checked off how Ben Affleck, […]
Birdman – 2.5
A thoroughly unpleasant movie experience. After our friend Jeremy Shamos gets knocked out, we are left with five highly neurotic characters who have zero appeal among them. Director Inarritu heightens the unpleasantness with a distracting continuous-tracking camera shot. What’s funny is how reviewers complained that the theater-critic character was unrealistic, when the entire movie was […]
The Drop 7.5
Atmosphere, characters and great acting – what more could you want? A plot that makes sense? Nah, just keep us guessing and move it along, a la Lehane’s earlier Shutter Island. (I mean, why would a punk keep wearing a broken watch?) Tom Hardy’s near-autistic bartender was astonishing: you could read the blankness behind his […]
The Kill Team – 6
What was fascinating was trying to figure out how the filmmakers got their footage of Adam Winfield with his psychiatrist, his defense lawyer, his parents. Perhaps someone decided when he got arrested that his best hope of justice was to film everything. Getting such cooperation from codefendant Morlock, after he was sentenced to 24 years […]
Tim’s Vermeer – 5
Tedious in the extreme, even when seen on a transocean airflight. The opening montage of actual Vermeer paintings made everything that followed pale in comparison. An analogy might be watching someone without much personality dissecting a Penn & Teller magic trick for 90 minutes, as opposed to watching the trick itself.
Guardians of the Galaxy – 7.7
A good-spirited hoot of a movie. Lots of character-based laugh-out-loud moments and fun ’80s music amid all the whizzing around. It came across not so much as a Star Wars parody as a Star Wars reductio ad absurdum, with a raccoon in place of R2-D2 and a tree for 3CPO.
A Man Most Wanted – 8
A totally engrossing spy thriller from John LeCarre’s novel put us right back in the world of Homeland, The Honorable Wpoman and Chinatown, all of which we watched on home TV last week. Washed-out cinematography put us in the grey underworld of Hamburg, and Philip Seymour Hoffman dominated the screen like a beached whale. The […]
Begin Again – 7
There are worse ways to spend a Thursday afternoon than watching Keira Knightley morph from nice-looking to irresistible – it’s in the eyes (not the teeth) – and listening to decent music – more like Once than Kinky Boots – although I can’t say the same for the Mark Ruffalo character. The story itself ranged […]
Get On Up – 5
A mess of a movie, somewhat salvaged by an extraordinary performance by Chadwick Boseman. A bunch of disconnected scenes add up, dramatically, to nothing. The scenes of James Brown’s youth, weakly reminiscent of the much better Ray, explain little, although one is rather surprised that as a youth he had no rhythm and couldn’t carry […]
© Copyright 2019 Robert Marshall | All Rights Reserved.