A character study – no more, no less – of a high-energy, happy-go-lucky 30-year-old who is putting off adulthood for no bad reason. Her goofy intensity, or intense goofiness, can rub people the wrong way or be endearing: characters in the film showed both reactions and I shared them. At the end, however, I was convinced I […]
This movie was supposedly about how we learn and aging. I learned nothing, but was 140 minutes older when it ended. Or maybe it was about love – but I found Cate Blanchett cold, Brad Pitt bloodless, chemistry lacking and their relationship an unconvincing Hollywood cliché. So what I was left with was a Forrest […]
Quel plaisir to spend 152 minutes with a French family, even one as dysfunctional as this. It took a while to figure out who was who, let alone why, and then part of the fun was deciding whom you liked the most and why. The men were either reprobates or ciphers, except for the short […]
A nicely done theatrical piece, more than a movie – and I’m not sure how well it relates to actual history. Frank Langella’s portrayal of Tricky Dick was superb, but even with all the layers he conveyed, one felt it didn’t come close to plumbing the actual depths of Nixon’s character. What really drove the […]
I can’t think of a single scene that failed to tax my credulity, either due to the extremity of the characterization, the absurdity of the plot, or the inconsistency of the direction. So often did I hear myself thinking, this would never happen like this, that I could only conclude that this was another of […]
I admit to a personal aversion to Indian poverty and I favor realism to highly improbable stories, but this movie plugged into the energy of Mumbai and swept me along until, best of all, a curtain call in which the cast sang and danced and all the sordidness, violence, corruption and depressing poverty was temporarily […]
The longest two hours I’ve had in a movie this year. For 15 minutes the film showed promise, with Charlie Kaufman-trademark quirkiness leavening Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener’s dysfunctional marriage. Then the MacArthur grant arrives and the few remaining tethers to reality are cut loose, leaving us nothing to care about. People are not […]
Anne Hathaway gives a riveting performance (Best of the Year) as the psychotic woman released from rehab to attend, but in the event almost wreck, her sister’s wedding. The other characters barely register (I kept waiting in vain for Sidney to display some evidence of a personality), and none can draw our eyes away from […]
We saw this a year later, and on TV, but my firm belief is that this is the one movie about the Iraq war, so far at least, that will stand the test of time. (We tried to watch The Deer Hunter the other night, to see if that plays a similar role for Vietnam, […]
Unfortunately, a loser of a film about unfortunate losers in the rock’n’roll sweepstakes, the Canadian heavy-metallists, Anvil. The two leads, Lips and Robb, look so much like the stars of Spinal Tap, the film often resembles a parody of a parody, which is not a good thing. The songs, of which we get to hear […]
© Copyright 2019 Robert Marshall | All Rights Reserved.