While inclined going in to treat this as a throwaway film, Anne Hathaway’s bare-it-all performance was so compelling that I was mesmerized right up to the cliche of an ending. Jake Gyllenhaal’s low-key charm was also easy on the eyes and mind, seducing the viewer along with every woman onscreen. The corporate shenanigans verged on Up […]
As with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, I knew everything that was going to happen, so much of the pleasure was in seeing how familiar events and people were portrayed. The best example: there was no need to introduce the Karl Rove character; director Doug Liman merely had to put a fat, jowly […]
A very skillful adaptation of the book, with only Dr. Teleborian disappointing my mental image. One wonders how someone who had not read the book would appreciate, or follow, the complex story, but then again there probably aren’t many people who fall in that category. For those of us who had read it, it was fun […]
The only interest for me was the cross-cultural view of the life of the Chinese factory worker, and its evidence of why they are making our blue jeans for us. The family story went nowhere in particular, and the contrast between city and country life was unconvincing: if life in the country was so much […]
A casually clever countryside caper, the kind the British do so well, mostly about love – or is it sex? There are no car crashes – albeit a stampede of cows – and no patent absurdities – albeit a number of stretches. There are, however, a number of fun characters, all gracefully identified in cameo […]
Unfortunatley overhyped, this expose of the 2008 financial crisis told us nothing we hadn’t already learned from Michael Lewis’s more insightful The Big Short. It wasted its skewers on academics, who were hardly major culprits, and the talking heads who provided the story line were mainly people we’d never heard of, whose legitimacy was never […]
This had more the feeling of a short story – by O.Henry, say – than the movie equivalent of a novel. Not because it was short, which it was, but because it offered a slice of life, a la Woody Allen, without reaching any conclusions. Yes, it was a comment on the human condition, full […]
On my personal scorecard of movies with the most gratuitous scenes of characters smoking, there is a new leader: Nowhere Boy. Scarcely a scene goes by without someone, old or young, fingering a cigarette. This factoid is of added interest, if not relevance, because director Sam Taylor-Wood happens to be the artist who created the […]
Less a plotted melodrama than a fascinating character study for which Jesse Eisenberg should get an Oscar nomination, at least. He does more with his eyes than most actors this year have done with their entire bodies. Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin is good, too, but I can’t say as much for the rest of the […]
Given that George Clooney has such good looks, good voice, eyes that twinkle and adequate acting ability, why can’t someone teach him to run? First in Michael Clayton, now in The American, this macho sexpot starts to sprint…and moves like a girl! Really, this movie is all about George Clooney, or should I say, George […]
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