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 […]
It is very hard to make a convincing movie about corporate malfeasance or corruption. There are so many checks and balances and audits and committees. Richard Gere’s story in this Wall Streeter seem as implausible as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s bike-riding in Premium Rush. One, of course, is reminded of Bernie Madoff and Tom Petters, but I’m […]
Christian Bale is a convincing and compelling Batman in this superbly acted, directed and photographed (wish I’d seen it at IMAX) action brooder. Somehow the story races along on parallel tracks – one grounded in real-world actions and emotions, the other on a superhero plane – without letting you ponder or making you question this […]
For the first 15 minutes they take off their clothes, for the rest of the film they bare their souls. The conceit and the dialogue are very ’60s French, and I only caught on slowly that Quebec, not Marseille, was the location of the dingy apartment. I can’t say that anything profound or enlightening emerged […]
How sweet, how innocent, how French! How could anyone with a heart, and nostalgia for simple life in the country before the war (WWI!), not melt at the love affair between the rich, but talented, boy and the poor, but sophisticated, girl. Actually, the love affair we had to take a bit on faith; what […]
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