This one is all about acting and psychology: how do you feel about what each of the characters lives through, and how well do they portray it? Brie Larson is amazingly equable in a seemingly insupportable situation; when she cracks you’re only surprised it didn’t happen sooner. The kid plays a kid – he’s the […]
Yesterday we finished the musicals portion of our fall Broadway season, seeing in one week A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Something Rotten and Beautiful, a month after we saw Hamilton. Although criticism is something more than assigning grades, that is where I will start, with the above receiving, respectively, B-, A-, B […]
Just as Hollywood-perfect as The Martian, with great acting, fun story and scene-after-scene that brought tears to my eyes – except this story really happened. Bryan Cranston deserves Oscar consideration for his intense portrayal of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a hero presented with just enough flaws to avoid treacle. It’s also fun to see actors playing John […]
I look on this as a mood piece with a riveting score, maybe an homage to the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, with Benicio del Toro in the Javier Bardem role. Or it could be a domestic analogue to Zero Dark Thirty, with torture and extra-legal black ops producing the assassination of the Mexican drug kingpin. […]
How can you not root for Matt Damon – our generation’s Jimmy Stewart, as one critic said – as he struggles to survive for years all alone on Mars? And how can you not root for Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mackenzie Davis back in Houston. (Jeff Daniels is the resident prig, but how bad […]
A delightful road trip down to New Orleans with Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn, portraying, respectively, a natural winner and a born loser. The ending was not exactly what the story set us up for, but I won’t complain about a little fantasy. For all the gritty shots of Iowa, St. Louis and Memphis, this […]
Not a lot of “up” moments (any?) in this tale of unscrupulous real estate dealings in an overextended Florida housing market. Michael Shannon offered a deal with the devil and Andrew Garfield took it. The drama may have exaggerated the reality, but the knowledge that thousands of people lost their homes in the actual crisis […]
Maybe if I hadn’t seen the excellent documentary, Bobby Fischer Against the World, I would have found something of interest in this recounting of the Fischer-Spassky chess championship. As it is, I found the characters cliches, drama lacking and the whole thing rather pointless.
Just when you thought you’d seen an amazing movie about three “professional climbers” (whatever they are) almost making it to the top of the previously unscaled Himalayan peak known as “Meru,” only to be foiled by bad weather, lack of food and frozen toes, you found out that – oh, no! – they’re going to […]
There are amazing stories in the life of Steve Jobs: how two kids in a garage took on one of the world’s most powerful companies, IBM, and came out on top; how Steve Jobs, after getting fired, came back to Apple and returned it from near-bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world; how […]
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