Archive for category: Reviews

Better than Ocean’s Eight, but not by much, this female heist movie had improbabilities piled on implausibilities, with enough loose threads to make a mitten. Viola Davis and Liam Neeson seemed an unlikely pair from the get-go (with Neeson overexposed in the trailers before the show), but the idea that the other widows would go along with her was topped only by their instantaneous competence, which in turn was superseded by plot twists from out of the blue, thanks perhaps to screenwriter Gillian Flynn. The movie’s saving grace was the supporting performances of Michelle Rodriguez and the gorgeous Elizabeth Debicki. Perhaps to appease the unwritten rules governing Hollywood, there were gratuitous shots of cigarette smoking and female nudity.

The “feel-good” movie of the year, with scene after scene of the good guys standing up to the bigots, one great song after another filling the soundtrack, and an almost entire cast of characters the modern, educated audience could feel superior to. Danish-American Viggo Mortenson was splendid as the minor Mafioso Tony Lip and Linda Cardellini as his adorable wife was the cherry on top. Her role was small, but she got the last and best line. There was nothing subtle or unpredictable about the dialogue or plot except for Mahershala Ali’s portrayal of the musician Don Shirley as a black man in a white world with a lot of issues, which I never really figured out.

There’s only one Coen Brothers – well, actually, there are two of them, but their vision is singular and unique. They are also masters of the craft of filmmaking; you feel they can do whatever they want, and you luxuriate in the experience. For the Coens, violence is an art, genres are meant to be played with, and laughter and terror are constant and uneasy bedfellows. If No Country for Old Men was a Dostoevsky novel, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a collection of Chekhov short stories, with allusions to Shakespeare, Chagall, Twain, Tarantino, Huston, and hundreds of Westerns before Indians became Native-Americans. Uniting the disparate stories was precise dialogue, erudite and literary, taken from a volume that looked like my Dodd, Mead Classics. My favorite was “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” for its sheer beauty, the complexity of its story and the acting of Zoe Kazan, although “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” set the table perfectly, was laugh-out-loud funny and merited its eponimity. Least favorite: “Meal Ticket.” Definitely on the plus side of the Coen Bros. ledger.

Like a Monet garden scene, Colette is a lovely period piece, more art than fire. The always beautiful Keira Knightley (how does she look so young!) embodies the turn-of-the-century writer/performer as she explores life and emerges from her husband’s shadow and control. To me, Dominic West’s role – and its contrast with Jonathan Pryce’s in The Wife – was the point of interest. I thought he was a somewhat sympathetic character (Siri didn’t); he certainly could have been painted worse, more Munch than Monet.

Michael Moore has packed four movies, four movies, four movies-in-one, at least! There’s Hillary’s defeat; Flint’s water crisis; the Parkland school shooting; and Trump’s neo-Fascism, at least two of which pick up on earlier Moore films. There’s a ray of hope in the person of four emerging radical candidates for Congress and the West Virginia teachers’ strike, balanced by a discussion with a Yale history professor cautioning that our democracy is not a given. As a coherent movie, this doesn’t score very high, but as a collection of clips that make you alternately sad and outraged, it does the job.