Not since My Dinner With Andre have I watched two such uninteresting characters talk so self-indulgently, often in complete paragraphs, to so little purpose. Julie Delpy came across as real, albeit neurotic, but Ethan Hawke was unconvincing as a novelist, as an expatriate, and certainly as a dad. When you watch a young couple courting, […]
What is it with cigarettes and movies? Although smoking has not been a part of “the world I live in” for 40 years or more, 80% of the movies I see have a scene with a character who lights up. Is this the only way to tell us we are in the 1950s, or that […]
Compellingly strange or strangely compelling, this Mexican film at the Walker Art Center was like a puzzle without an answer that was still fun to do. Just as all paintings needn’t be realistic, not all movies need to make narrative sense. Here, one discrete scene followed another – some were past, some present, some imaginary […]
The power and brilliance of Shakespeare has never, for me, shone more brightly than in this semi-documentary of a prison production of Julias Caesar. Italian criminals brought a peculiar resonance to the depiction of Roman senators, and the fact that they looked like people I know (Richard Blake as Cassius?) made the message even more […]
I learned more from hearing director/actor/producer Shane Carruth comment after the movie than I did from watching it. As I watched larva being implanted, I felt I was in a Matthew Barney art-house special. Nor could I make much sense of what followed, although the characters were compelling in a way, if you like lost […]
A Huck Finn boy’s adventure story, in which the messy adult world is viewed, but not quite understood, by 14-year-old Ellis and his best friend Neckbone. The plot hangs together neatly – too neatly for some, satisfyingly for me – and the setting is as real as Beasts of the Southern Wild was fanciful. My […]
Remember the Landmark Series of books – great events in history written (well) at a 6th-grade level? This could have been a movie version of one of those books, describing breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball. It did make me wonder about the reality of the events depicted, in a more nuanced world […]
Very cool. I don’t know if what she does is “art” or “theater,” or maybe “performance art” is something in between, but what matters for this film is how well we get to know Marina Abramovic, how open she is to the filmmakers and how she works her way into our hearts. I was skeptical […]
The most notable aspect of this film was its structure, which Siri didn’t like but which I admired for its originality: the movie’s first half was about the Ryan Gosling character; the movie’s second half was about the Bradley Cooper character; and the third half, a separate coda 15 years later, was about their respective […]
It was hard to find a socially redeeming quality in this film about sex, drugs and violence on spring break in Florida, and despite thinking long and hard I failed. Nothing was realistic, so okay, maybe this is some kind of American magic realism. Except there was no magic. Just a lot of posing. James […]
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