Silly fun, marred for me by a climactic battle that was befuddling, overlong and beyond absurd. Until then I could enjoy the comic-book characters, especially Chris Pine, and the cinematically familiar settings of World War I trenches, British cabinet meetings and German evil. Gal Gadot got better-looking as the movie progressed, which was good because we saw a lot of her.
A feminine thriller in full Southern Gothic mode, Sofia Coppola turns the cinematic tables with an almost all-female cast lusting in their separate ways for the hunky Union soldier dropped into their laps. Calling it a period piece is an understatement, as Coppola pulls out the beautiful dresses, the dripping Spanish moss, the candlelit chandeliers and the etiquette and French lessons of Miss Farnsworth’s Academy to full effect. Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning have convincing, and contrasting, Southern personalities, and Colin Farrell is best when lying supine. The story is at best an excuse for the acting and the scenery. I can see why this won a Cannes award for Best Director, not Best Picture.
In the end, Norman the fixer’s dealmaking pays off for all his friends through his ultimate self-sacrifice, and he ironically achieves the goal of his nemesis, the Israeli Justice Department official, by doing something that makes the world a better place. Or, more likely, all the good things shown on screen are happening in Norman’s imagination, as he says goodbye to the world. Whatever, we have come to identify with this lovable loser, skillfully portrayed by Richard Gere: he’s not exactly admirable, living, as he does, in a land of hopes and half-truths, but he’s not a bad guy, either. The Jewishness of the movie and its Israeli politics made me uncomfortable at first, but they were deftly handled and I came around. Maybe Steve Buscemi’s Italian rabbi was the needed balance.
Totally satisfactory as a tribute to the Grateful Dead, four hours of archival footage and talking heads from the band and fans. Of course, the soundtrack was one happy thrill after another. Seeing it in a full house of Deadheads in Greenwich Village, with director Amir Bar-Lev present, made it more a pilgrimage than a mere movie experience. There was an underlying story, too, beyond the Dead’s musical innovation and excellence: their communal spirit informed and epitomized the ’60s flower-power era but couldn’t deal with the success that turned their concerts into near riots and perversely locked Jerry Garcia into an isolation that produced his drug-induced death. Oh, and Phil Lesh looks a lot better now than he did in the ’60s.
Seen amid a slew of Broadway productions, it was refreshing to enter a world of real people, real situations and real emotions. Not that the affairs seemed terribly real – it was hard to see what the respective individuals saw in each other – but the characters portrayed by Debra Winger and Tracy Letts were so well acted, and dressed so frumpily, that you scarcely thought of them as movie stars. There were no big stakes here, just people coping with their everyday lives, and you didn’t even particularly care how things worked out, or didn’t. The trick ending produced a smile and a deep thought or two as you left the theater, but it was probably the least real moment of the film.
Supposedly based on a novel, The Lost City of Z seemed more likely to have been based on a comic book. The lack of sophistication and subtlety in plot and acting was on a par with Brad Pitt’s performances in, inter alia Inglorious Basterds and, more recently, Allied. Imagine my lack of surprise, then, when the credits rolled and I saw that the movie’s producer was…Brad Pitt. Chris Hunnam, in the lead role, seemed to have gotten the part because of his physical resemblance to…Brad Pitt. Sienna Miller stood out among the cardboard characters, but her role was an anachronistic cliche. Add one more notch to the string of movies “based upon a true story” that you wouldn’t believe if they’d made it up.
A totally fun horror film, with just the right amount of sci-fi mumbo-jumbo and tension-breaking humor. Allison Williams is charming, until she isn’t; Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford are wonderfully debonair parents, until hell breaks loose. The racially charged setup – white girl bringing black boyfriend home for the weekend – adds tension and a bit of misdirection. And the ending couldn’t be more gratifying.
A little Sam Elliot is a delight to watch. An entire movie with nothing but closeups of Sam Elliot is rather too much. The story – an aging cowboy movie star given new life by a young girlfriend and a viral video – is neither deep nor plausible, and the secondary characters don’t do much with what little they’re given. In short, a film for Sam Elliot devotees only. (San Francisco Film Festival)
A not terribly well made documentary about a not terribly interesting man engaged, not terribly successfully, in mixed martial arts – something I’m not terribly interested in and certainly don’t enjoy watching. The filmmaker took life as he found it – and the access he achieved was remarkable; not every life, however, is worth a film. (San Francisco Film Festival)
(fuller review TK). Real-world cinema, in this case from Iran: no special effects, no histrionics, just real people facing real situations, making choices that the viewer can admire or criticize. In other words, we are drawn into director TK’s vision and made to question our own feelings and reactions. Here, notably, we admire the lead male for his sensitivity, forbearance, skill with his pupils and ability to hold it all together; while we lose sympathy with his wife, despite her rape, as she is unable to move on and stop burdening those around her. And then our sympathies shift. For every character we see the good and the bad. And we recognize that here, as in life, there is no black and white, only many shades of grey that blend into one another, for better and worse.
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