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 […]
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.
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A charming passage through the growing-up years of one Mason Evans; our own youths may have been different, but we recognized the situations, with lots of nods and knowing smiles. Richard Linklater’s technique – filming the same actors over a 12-year period – gets all the attention, deservedly – but one shouldn’t overlook the performance […]
The fact that it struck me as unrealistic that Malcolm was able to revive a hydroelectric plant while the rest of the movie featured talking apes says how convincing was the overall illusion. The special effects were indeed special, but it was the humanity of Caesar and his cohort, as well as the performance of […]
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 […]
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