A comic but true-to-the-core depiction of Arab society in a small village where everyone knows, and gossips about, everyone else, usually at high volume. Meanwhile, below (or above) the frivolous surface, this smart movie presents the dichotomies of man and woman, love and hate, Christian and Muslim, life and death. All the actors are convincingly […]
Some thought that I rated last year’s Just Go With It inordinately high because of a puerile infatuation with Jennifer Aniston. As rebuttal, look at this rating: Jennifer was as adorable as ever, but this movie was just plain stupid. For some reason (their own lust?), the critics at The New Yorker, New York Times, […]
The best use of 3-D I’ve seen yet: it was unobtrusive – no dancers kicking legs into our space – and simply made the dances come alive. Like the documentaries at the Film Festival, there was no plot and no dramatic arc, just a series of dances and interviews with the dancers. It didn’t […]
Bobby Fischer Against the World. A mesmerizing subject, told with appropriate drama and objectivity. The talking heads were uniformly insightful and the historic clips were fascinating,
A very French film about the working-class student who is madly in love with the rich beauty until he wakes up to/with the slightly less beautiful girl who has been vainly chasing him. What either girl sees in Primo is a total mystery unless they, like the director, see him as a reincarnation of Jean […]
Kevin Kline is the best comedic actor of his generation, Diane Keaton is an unfailingly charming but a little ditsy comedienne, and together they anchor this hilarious but touching Big Chill-at-60 reprise by director Lawrence Kasdan. The plot is ostensibly about a lost dog, Freeway, but I needn’t have worried: Freeway is lost for much […]
A rather mystifying, unneeded retelling of the classic John le Carre/Alec Guinness spy story. The main characters are represented by chess pieces, and that’s about how much they come to life. Gary Oldman is widely praised for his Smiley, but his expression changed only on the few occasions his ex-wife was mentioned. I found it […]
Like War Horse, this was an hommage to an era of movies past, and, also like War Horse, for me it was devoid of originality or emotional involvement. Unlike the Spielberg film, which actively annoyed me, this one merely left me cold. Featuring a lead character who was vain, proud, mean to his wife and […]
I can’t think of a book whose plot I remember so well as Girl, which made this relatively faithful adaptation more a checklist for me than a separate cinema experience. I had no objections to the presentation, although neither Daniel Craig nor Rooney Mara matched my imagination; but I have to wonder what someone who […]
This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen – at least for this year. Attempting an homage to “sincere” movies of the ’40s and ’50s, Steven Spielberg came up with an epic that was not merely corny, but phony. Every scene was absurd, every character a cliche: the dastardly landlord, the dissolute father, the long-suffering […]
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