Archive for category: Reviews

A charming rom-com in the Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts mold that might have scored even higher if I could have understood the English (Irish/Australian) accents. All four characters were delightful: the beauteous Rose Byrne, the humorously cloddish Chris O’Dowd, the talented slacker Ethan Hawke and the precocious Azhy Robertson, who at maybe 9 years old was clearly the sanest of the bunch. As befits a Nick Hornby story, the music was fabulous: “Different Drum,” “Mixed Up, Shook Up Girl,” “Waterloo Sunset” as well as the not-bad “Tucker Crowe” originals. What fun to watch an easy-to-follow movie with no bad guys, no nervous or cringing moments, just a path full of interesting details for the characters to figure out their way in life.

An early frontrunner for Worst Film of the Year: cliched acting, flat directing, a void of a plot (“Lisa’s Bad Day” was the sum and substance of the story), visually uninteresting setting, and generally unappealing characters. There was not a single one of the disjointed scenes that connected with me or didn’t make me wish I were watching TV instead. Some audience members laughed uproariously – at what? – and all three papers we read gave it a good review, so there is no accounting for taste. I kept waiting for something to connect; it never did.

Excruciating and exquisite at the same time, this movie walks a fine line beautifully: we see Kayla Day at her most unattractive, yet we like her all the same. She has enough acne to be real, but not so much that we look away. And if anybody doesn’t identify with at least one scene, if not many, they have surely forgotten what it was like to be 14. Josh Hamilton’s Dad is a bouncy counterpoint, keeping things light; and the movie’s use of social media is so today, just perfect. I don’t think I’m the target audience for this film, but I loved it.

This could be viewed as a film about the PTSD of Vietnam veterans, a father-daughter relationship or social communities, but I admired it most for the coming-of-age performance by Thomasin McKenzie, a wonderfully ingenuous New Zealand actress. She seemed to grow up as she moved from the forest to living with others, even while her father couldn’t change. After reading the brilliant novel, “Yellow Birds,” I wasn’t surprised by the father’s inability to cope with society, but it still seemed rather a stretch to believe he could survive and raise his daughter on a diet of foraged mushrooms. But as I’ve said, concerns about the plot – and I had many – took a back seat to the pleasure of watching Tom.

For two-thirds this was an unusually realistic take on motherhood, albeit focused on the negative, made enjoyable by the intelligent dialogue and the fine acting of Charlize Theron. Then the plot jumped off the tracks, and Theron’s character started acting in ways that made no sense. At the end, was it revealed that the nanny had been a figment of Marlo’s imagination? If so, much of what came before made no sense and I felt cheated. What I had been praising as “realistic” wasn’t realistic at all. And the more I looked back, the less I liked what I had seen.