A young adult movie not recommended for anyone over 14 or under 12. Shailene Woodley is commendable as a teenage cancer sufferer, but her love interest is pretty insufferable and Sam Trammell as her father turns in the worst acting performance of the year. Laura Dern is good, as usual, although it’s hard to reconcile […]
It must be a half-hour into the movie before we get what we came for – Sherry, Baby – and all the music before that, including a screechy Silhouettes, is pretty execrable. That’s only one of several confounding choices by director Clint Eastwood, making this movie much more than a singalong, although that’s where the […]
Absolutely gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, reminiscent of Kertesz or Brassai, brought out the purity of Ida’s faith. By implicit contrast, the drugs/sex/rock’n’roll and politics of the world outside the convent was unsatisfying, if not pointless, although filmmaker Pawlikowski seemed to be speaking just for Ida.
A total misfire. Seth MacFarlane’s jokes missed their target as often as his character’s bullets. Many reminded me of the kind of things one heard in a 6th-grade lockerroom. All that raised this above a zero were the steely presence of Liam Neeson and the soap-bar beauty of Charlize Theron.
It was a pleasure to luxuriate in a film where the dialogue consisted of complete sentences and the costumes, settings and actors were gorgeous. Granted, this was a pale imitation of Merchant-Ivory, and even Downton Abbey had more suspense, surprise and originality; but still it Trolloped along inoffensively and brought mist to the eye as […]
An unrelentingly dark picture of the Lower East Side in 1921 and the unrelentingly dark life facing penniless immigrants in New York. The story, which suffers from loose ends all over, depends on three skilled actors, all seemingly miscast. Jeremy Renner, so intense in The Hurt Locker, hardly seems the lightfooted magician. Joaquin Phoenix, a […]
A one-person drama that is daring in conception and clever in execution; but in the end you feel it might work better as a play or a short story. We get a pretty good read on Tom Hardy’s character halfway through, and with no more surprises you wait for his car to arrive, which, metaphorically […]
It was interesting to compare this to Turn!, the AMC serial about the Revolutionary War, in which the occupying British forces are automatically the bad guys, to be slaughtered without compunction. Here, the occupiers were Americans – hence, the good guys – although it was not otherwise explained why they were in Afghanistan and we […]
This film made no sense. Absolutely none (unless, apparently, you had read the book it was based on). Much dialogue was unintelligible and the cinematography was dreary. It even managed to make an unclothed Scarlett Johansson unattractive. [Smoking -1, incidental crowd scenes]
Perhaps this was Canada’s version of Magic Realism, or perhaps it was cinema-by-collage. However it can be described, it certainly was bizarre. Start with the casting of Jake Gyllenhaal, who was convincing neither as a college history professor nor as his more financially successful doppelganger. Instead of an attempt at reality, I had the feeling […]
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