Good music brings so much to a movie, and the original songs by T Bone Burnett and Scott Bruton carried this sucker, along with a bravura, Oscar-worthy performance by…Maggie Gyllenhaal. Jeff Bridges, who is getting so much acclaim, is fine, but I didn’t see a lot of challenge in the role. Without the music, it’s […]
An expression of a sensibility, best described as “Almodovar.” The plot intrigues, then fizzles to a ‘huh’ ending, leaving us with the many guises of Penelope Cruz – not so realistic or compelling as, say, in Volver. In a movie about a movie about a movie, artifice is inevitable and may be the point. It’s […]
Perfectly charming divertissement set in Santa Barbara, with Meryl Streep acting up a storm opposite two cardboard comedians, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Not that they aren’t funny, it’s just hard to take Jane’s dilemma or predicament or situation as seriously as Meryl does, with those two not-so-real gentlemen as her choices. The best comic […]
A totally charmant film. I had tears of pleasure streaming down my face from the first TV impersonation of Julia Child by Meryl Streep until the end (Dan Ackroyd?). Contrary to most reviewers, I thought Amy Adams held her own, too (although her chaste persona does get to me a bit). I think having seen […]
There’s a scene where the party boat runs out of gas, the lights go off, and the guests enter the hotel, having waded ashore. It’s sort of cute, but what’s it got to do with the movie? It advances neither the plot nor the characters. A good editor would have cut it out, except that […]
Such a stylish film, shot in sepia, except for the scenes in color and the ones in black-and-white; told exclusively through the eyes of George Falconer (Colin Firth), except for the scene of Charly (Julianne Moore) applying her makeup; with so many lingering shots of beautiful young men you felt this was a gay director’s […]
As a lover of movies on sports and racial equality, I expected this to be an easy winner. Instead, I found the sports incomprehensible and the race relations so clichéd that I left wondering how a movie about Nelson Mandela could be so uninspiring. Morgan Freeman was impeccable, if boring, but Matt Damon was a […]
Avatar the Experience was seamless: I never questioned whatever world it was the 3D glasses helped transport us to. Was it any more remarkable a cinematic experience than Lord of the Rings, though? Or, for that matter, The Wizard of Oz, which we watched on TV last week? (The flying enoks of Pandora seem to […]
Absurd from start to finish, this disaster film contained not a single enjoyable scene, and it was barely kept afloat by its snippets of memorable, albeit too predictable, ‘60s music. It was especially disappointing coming from Richard Curtis, who contributed to such prior favorites as Love, Actually, Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral. […]
The Harvard Lampoon used to put out issues that struck its editors, but few others, as hilarious. I felt in the presence of similar “inside” humor as I watched Mr. Fox trot on down the hill in post-Roadrunner cartoon style. Obviously, when you hire George Clooney and Meryl Streep to voice your characters more is […]
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