A taut, tingling, stylish and supercool action thriller. The plot is a genre staple; how it is told makes the movie. Nicolas Winding Refn uses silences, and holds them, while the background drumbeat and technomusic push the suspense, and when violence erupts it is shocking – as in the sensation of an electric prod on […]
A rare old-fashioned well-made film, with good guys, bad guys, a plot, fine acting, a bit of history, local color and a satisfying ending. This is sure-fire Oscar bait, although with so many deserving actresses – in order, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Emma Stone and Jessica Chastain – it’s hard to know who will get […]
A bit of lightweight fluff, athough there may have been serious undercurrents lurking, as suggested more by the title in French, Les Noms des Gens, as in, what’s in a name?, or who is really French? The biggest revelation may have been how unerotic full-frontal nudity of a beautiful woman could be, as Sara Forestier […]
One wonders how good a movie this could have been with a real actor instead of Steve Carrell in the lead role, but since he was the movie’s executive producer that wasn’t going to happen. As a result, you had Julianne Moore going through a kaleidoscope of facial expressions, showing real hurt, confusion, and longing, […]
This was about as real as a $3 bill. Aside from Jenna Elfman, I can think of no character or scene that could exist outside the hackneyed imagination of a fledgling Hollywood sitcom writer. And as for the buzz that Justin Timberlake can act, don’t believe that, either.
Even Impressionist paintings have a subject, but this collection of vignettes about the New York Times went all over the place. Was this film about how the Times now covers the media? about the Times’s uneasy relationship with new media? about the troubling economics of print journalism? how a story – e.g., the rise of […]
One’s appreciation of this film surely depends on one’s interest in, or tolerance for, Steve Coogan. To his credit, he has taken the role of the successful loser, less funny than his sidekick Rob Brydon and more at sea in his personal life. Because of his conceit, however, we don’t enjoy the time spent alone […]
When a documentary maker sets out to chronicle someone’s life, he or she never knows if something dramatic will occur that will make the finished documentary exciting, emotional, or at least interesting. In this case, the story of horse trainer Buck Branaman, nothing happened and the result is, frankly, boring. If watching horses in a […]
There was no shortage of ambition, or pretension, in Terrence Malick’s fifth opus, which complements, for some reason, the evolution of the universe with the arc of one average man’s (Malick’s?) life in Waco, Texas. Young Jack has steely eyes, and his bildungsroman might have made a good story, although how he morphs into the […]
A quintessential samurai movie (I forget the Japanese word for this genre), replete with the gathering of ronin, the revenge motive, the uncouth jester, and the bloody battle at the end. There is a hint, maybe more, of a larger message: what a waste this is, wouldn’t it be better if we devoted our energies […]
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