The milieu is the costar of this story of a heroic 17-year-old girl’s fight to save her family’s home from the bail bondsman. It’s remarkable that director Debra Granik could find so many scrungy-looking hillbillies who could act so naturally. The people live by their own moral code, but they also raise livestock, cook, sing […]
The contrast, on back-to-back nights, between Donald Margulies’ new play, Time Stands Still, and a revival of the Arthur Miller chestnut, A View from the Bridge, made me reflect that a golden age of drama, like the Greeks experienced or like the Rodgers and Hammerstein era of the musical, has passed. Margulies’ work was facile […]
This movie signifies the decline of French civilization, or French cinema, or the career of Alain Resnais. Or maybe, as other reviewers claim, it is a masterpiece. To me, nothing made sense. Unlike Marienbad, where inscrutability created a mood and fomented ratiocinization, here the musical score was unduly portentous and the characters left me cold. I […]
A pitch-perfect sendup of the music business, school of Spinal Tap. Numerous laugh-out-loud scenes mixed with man-love, gross sex, and nebbishy boy-girl love – the Judd Apatow formula that I’m a sucker for. Sean Combs was a revelation – give that man an Oscar! – while Russell Brand and Jonah Hill were brilliant. (How did […]
A bizarre movie, Italian-style. There were shades of Antonioni and Visconti’s The Leopard, with Tilda Swinton as a blonde Russian fitting in or not. Based on the title, I was expecting a moral about love; but love seemed to go in every direction, based on which characters you considered. The director cut away from each […]
An idiosyncratic story about – or at least, a look at – relationships among five women and one man living more or less next door to each other, very much in Manhattan. Oliver Platt was bit pudgy for my taste, but the five women were pitch-perfect: my fave was Rebecca Hall (again!) in the Charlotte […]
Five characters of five nationalities in a country estate in Uruguay, struggling over the legacy of a popular one-book author, sounds like the setting for intriguing interpersonal relationships, if not a postmodern Chekhovian roundelay. Unfortunately, only Charlotte Gainsbourg and Anthony Hopkins inhabited their roles in a convincing manner, and too often the acting resembled an […]
Not much of a story – in fact, no story – just weak segues in Pierce Brosnan’s embarrasingly anthropomorphic and fey narration. There were plenty of “how-did-they-get-that?!” shots of whales, gannets, and stonefish, but without any common thread the “let’s-save-the-ocean” pitch came across as gratuitous.
I wish that the star, Thierry Guetta, had been more attractive and that he had been a better videographer, because the story of street art was inherently fascinating; I would have loved a movie all about Banksy, the nominal producer of this film (I have my doubts). As it was, Exit provided an inside, introductory look at one […]
If Martin Scorsese is such a great director, why does he cast Leonardo DiCaprio in the psychologically complicated role of Teddy Daniels? Or Mark Ruffalo as his sidekick, for that matter? Perhaps this was an unfilmable story, relying as it does on a shocking twist at the end that works far better on the page. […]
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