Jennifer Lawrence sizzled. Bradley Cooper burned. This film was at its most eloquent when neither spoke but looked into the other’s eyes. The plot points were goofily absurd, but that was just background for the onscreen chemistry between the two stars, who made you feel their longing – and their craziness. I felt a little […]
More interesting as history lesson than movie (assuming, of course, that the history was reliable). Daniel Day-Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones were terrific, but they were the only ones with good lines and interesting personalities. The others were drawn from the Hollywood stockyard, and the scenes they played were devoid of subtlety. I felt I was back in […]
Pure hokum, along the lines of a Disney after-school special – Spin & Marty, anyone? – but an enjoyably inoffensive gloss on the surfer culture I now find myself living amid. There’s no acting worth mentioning, and the women are window dressing, but the shots of the ocean, and the surfing, are worth sticking around […]
The great Christopher Walken is enough to enjoy this murder-comedy, but there are plenty of other wonderful performances: Colin Farrell as the procrastinating screenwriter, Woody Harrelson as the dog-loving gangster kingpin, Tom Waits as…Tom Waits?, and Sam Rockwell as the lead psychopath. The setup is rather primitive – for a reason that only appears after […]
A very adult thriller from Hollywood – bravo, Ben Affleck! The danger was real and historical, yet there weren’t any conventional bad guys: the Iranians were shown to have full justification, in their minds if not ours, for their actions. The hostages were presented as unglamorous everyday people – in fact, their appearances uncannily matched […]
One could list the ten most improbable moments of the film, starting with Amy Adams throwing her potential law firm partnership in the garbage can, or Rigo Sanchez, sans warmup, throwing fastballs past Bo Gentry (and if the issue is the curve, why make Rigo a lefthander?), and you’d probably have trouble stopping at ten; […]
The Star Tribune called this a “must-see for serious film lovers and a challenge for everyone else” – and here I thought all along that I was a serious film lover. For me, this was one pointless scene after another: the ‘Master’ rides a motorcycle on the desert salt flats – to what end? the […]
There was one heartwarming, tear-inducing moment in this documentary: when the obscure-everywhere-but-South-Africa folk singer Rodriguez makes a triumphant visit to Cape Town, 25 years after he is last heard of and presumed dead, and performs to an adoring, screaming sold-out crowd. The other virtue of the film lies in introducing us to the Dylanesque music […]
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