Archive for category: Reviews

It felt like an art museum, the Watteau gallery in particular, with soldiers parading and lovers dallying. By adapting a classic play, the movie suspended disbelief and even made the songs feel integral to the plot, which they were. Peter Dinklage, of course, is not a traditional Cyrano, but again, we weren’t looking for realism once we fell under director Joe Wright’s spell. This also allowed us to cast aside contemporary feminism and appreciate the dutifully shallow Roxanne. It’s a matter of taste, but we found Cyrano sweet, especially when viewed on a theater big screen.

A thrillingly different Eastern European film, this one from Romania with lots of blah shots of Bucharest and other social commentary. In Part 1 we meet the teacher, whose porn selfie with her husband has gotten loose on the Internet, as she wanders the streets, like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Part 2 I didn’t get, archival footage illustrating random words and phrases, very Romanian. Part 3 is the best Covid film I’ve seen, as masked and socially distanced parents debate the teacher’s job status, with polarization, misinformation, facts and prejudices in one wild cacophony. Seemingly filmed on an iPhone, the movie kept me wonderfully off-balance all the way.

Eight thousand years from now, with all the technological advances, they still fight like the Norman Conquest, or maybe the siege of Troy? Absurdity piles on absurdity, so much that we might as well be watching a comic book. If the .0001 per cent of the population that hasn’t been reduced to drone ant level were at least interesting, we might go along for the ride, but Timothee Chalamet appears to have been beamed in from another millenium and missed all his acting classes. The worst thing about sitting through this movie is finding out at the end that we have only seen Part 1.

Directorially brilliant, Todd Haynes’s portrait of the seminal punk rock group packs the wallop of the Velvets’ best music. He mixes archival footage from the era with wonderful modern interviews, all the while explaining how their songs came to be and, best of all, how they sounded. Like many, I knew three or four of their songs and was vaguely aware of their Warhol connection; so this was an education about a time and place–a scene–similar to the world of Patti Smith’s Just Kids. The movie pounded just as hard, fast and wild as a show at Max’s Kansas City.

A thriller recounting the exploits of…a Swiss private banker, who is eager, if not desperate, not to lose his accounts. The most interesting character is his predecessor, who is mentioned by everyone but does not appear in the film. Cigarette smoking is the closest things come to action. As a portrait of the Buenos Aires aristocracy in 1980, under the military takeover, this film is probably spot-on, but we wonder why we are there.