When a movie has a simple message to deliver, it can do a lot worse than getting Owen Wilson to deliver it. Moreover, he was the best Woody Allen-character surrogate I can remember, channeling Woody’s physical moves and intonations without the harsh edge or credulity strain when beautiful women fall for him. That simple message and […]
An impeccable documentary, if there is such a thing, telling the story of chess master Bobby Fischer from beginning to end. The interviews were just the right length: all contributed to the story’s momentum and came from people who seemed to know whereof they spoke. The climax of the Spassky match was folded neatly into […]
The plot, I think, ultimately made no sense, and many steps along the way weren’t credible, but the journey itself was powerful and disturbing. The two women actors, especially the daughter played by Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin , were extraordinary, and the overall depiction of Arab-on-Arab violence was hauntingly, and depressingly, real for someone who lived with […]
A trifle, although being French and filmed on Corsica, it was not without interest. The basic premise was absurd – an uneducated chambermaid goes from nothing to chess champion in a few months, and remains beautiful while staying up to practice all night and holding down two jobs during the day. Then there is the […]
“Cute,” was the word I heard most often from the decidedly older crowd leaving the Friday night $3 movies at the Hopkins Cinema, and that struck me as just about perfect. Like an Adam Sandler movie, it was sweet-spirited, with the bad guys not really being bad, just pompous. Sure, no one could be as […]
I feel I should approach this more as an opera, or a symphony, than a movie. Fugue and elegiac are the first words that come to mind, although I am not sure of their meaning. The wide screen at the Walker was filled with image after image taken from a Bierstadt painting, or in the […]
New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham is shown to be a charmingly idiosyncratic individual, and it is amazing that he can put together two very different pages of the Sunday Style section each week, apparently without a digital camera or motorized transportation. The movie itself skirts with some larger issues but largely avoids them […]
This was a truly “independent” film, in which none of the usual movie rules applied. For long stretches it was so “real” that it seemed lifeless. Except for Michelle Williams, recognizable even clothed head to foot, no effort was made to explain, or particularly distinguish, any of the characters. The Indian looked like someone from Milwaukee who […]
I don’t know what all the fuss, all the critical commentary and browbeating, is about. This was nothing but a typical Judd Apatow gross-out comedy, albeit with women instead of men providing the humor, frequently lewd. Granted, the lovable loser role, instead of being played by a schlumpy Seth Rogen or Jonah Hill, was given […]
A Werner Herzogian quest for the unusual and the unknowable, placing us inside a French cave with wall paintings from 32,000 years ago. Herzog’s dialogue is wonderfully breathless and the score is lusciously mystical, taking us out of the realms of archaeology and other science into the greater mysteries of human existence. Above all, one […]
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