One of those lucky documentaries that ran into a bigger story than the filmmaker could have anticipated – not that the largest house in America, the original story, wasn’t big. Instead, Lauren Greenfield wound up with a microcosm of the U.S. financial meltdown of 2008-09. Easy credit fueled David Siegel’s time-share empire and then brought […]
The highlight of this film is the Who’s Baba O’Riley, which plays during the opening and closing credits. Everything in between is just silly, starting with the characters and ending with the plot. For awhile, the rush of the bicycles in midtown Manhattan traffic carried me along, but that eventually grew tiresome and that was […]
So Russian, so Dostoevsky, so Cranes Are Flying, so Crime and Punishment! The camera never moves and the characters move slowly (except, notably, the flashing lifeguard). Everything is stolid, everything so mundane. The story, too, is stolid: a murder is committed, and gotten away with, for the benefit of the least deserving young man and […]
Pure hokum. Again, the curse of the “based on a true story.” No screenwriter would’ve dared come up with such an unlikely, farfetched story if he hadn’t had the stranger-than-fiction truth to egg him on. I couldn’t find a laugh all night, although the ladies behind me practically guffawed. As for me, it was a […]
At bottom, this is the same story as Beasts of the Southern Wild, with a little less color but without any of that movie’s flaws. Instead of a sick father raising his daughter with tough love to prepare her for the world, here was a doomed father running from the law, raising his son with […]
There’s a dance in the Dominican Republic on July 2 each year, when Major League baseball teams are permitted to sign contracts with 16-year-old Dominican ballplayers, who have this one chance to raise their entire family out of poverty. The temptation is great to lie about one’s age to command a higher signing bonus. MLB, […]
An extraordinary film, vividly capturing a foreign land inside the U.S. The acting is so authentic the movie comes across at times like a documentary, which led to my confusion: parts seem to be a commentary on post-Katrina Louisiana, while other parts – e.g., the escape from the hospital – are as fanciful as Moonrise […]
Half the humor and twice the budget of Ted, which we saw the same weekend. There are some artists you just don’t like – e.g., John Marin or Thomas Hart Benton – and Wes Anderson is one of those. His artistry is undeniable: he creates his alternate universe – this one is misleadingly labeled “1965” […]
The heartwarming love story of a boy and his teddy, the one who won’t grow up and the other mature beyond his species. Oh, and there’s also Mila Kunis as the woman who comes between them. The other character is Boston, the city of Dennis Lehane, the Afflecks and the Farrelly Brothers, with homages like […]
Un film francais “typique,” with sex and talk and sex and talk and then un peu de fantasie au fin. Was it extolling the liberating properties of prostitution or condemning the men who engage in it, as well as the men who don’t? Well, there didn’t seem to be a point. The one thing that […]
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