What was fascinating was trying to figure out how the filmmakers got their footage of Adam Winfield with his psychiatrist, his defense lawyer, his parents. Perhaps someone decided when he got arrested that his best hope of justice was to film everything. Getting such cooperation from codefendant Morlock, after he was sentenced to 24 years detention, was also noteworthy. The film itself, however, could as easily have been reduced to a 20 Minutes segment.
Tedious in the extreme, even when seen on a transocean airflight. The opening montage of actual Vermeer paintings made everything that followed pale in comparison. An analogy might be watching someone without much personality dissecting a Penn & Teller magic trick for 90 minutes, as opposed to watching the trick itself.
A good-spirited hoot of a movie. Lots of character-based laugh-out-loud moments and fun ’80s music amid all the whizzing around. It came across not so much as a Star Wars parody as a Star Wars reductio ad absurdum, with a raccoon in place of R2-D2 and a tree for 3CPO.
A charming passage through the growing-up years of one Mason Evans; our own youths may have been different, but we recognized the situations, with lots of nods and knowing smiles. Richard Linklater’s technique – filming the same actors over a 12-year period – gets all the attention, deservedly – but one shouldn’t overlook the performance of Patricia Arquette, the single mom who makes bad choices in men but holds her family together. The talkie nature is reminiscent of the Linklater’s series with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, but it’s astonishing how much better this movie was than his latest, Before Midnight.
A one-person drama that is daring in conception and clever in execution; but in the end you feel it might work better as a play or a short story. We get a pretty good read on Tom Hardy’s character halfway through, and with no more surprises you wait for his car to arrive, which, metaphorically and physically, it doesn’t.
I sat through 65 minutes without finding a scene that was either believable or likable. I once thought George Clooney could do no wrong, but here he’s done nothing right, from casting to acting to plot to tone. The famous actors, with the possible exception of Cate Blanchett, just play themselves and you wonder what they are doing in this bloody mess (by which I could mean the war or the movie).
Purest hokum. Every president since Ike and every civil rights moment since Brown v. Board of Education is seen through the eyes of a White House butler, and in order to compress them all, plus the growth of the Black Power movement, into the space of this movie, there’s not much room for subtlety or character development. The depiction of life on the farm pales in comparison to 12 Years A Slave, and the characterization of the butler made me long for Carson. I did cry a couple times, but that was because the historic events were so resonant, not because of anything Lee Daniels did.
This movie crept up on me. Watching on an airplane, I couldn’t make out some dialogue, and nothing much out of the ordinary seemed to be happening. The character of Oscar continued to build. Yes, he was a bit of a fuck-up: he cheated on his girl, he was hotheaded, he was fired from his job – but he had a heart of gold, loved his mom and was quick to help others. Good people, the movie seemed to say, can get in bad situations. The ending literally stunned me, and when I read the postscript – that this was a highly, if locally, publicized true event – I felt the tragedy, and its reflection on our world, even more deeply.
A remarkable film that involved me intellectually and emotionally from start to finish. Director Paul Greengrass set up an equality between the American captain and the Somali pirate at the outset, by showing both men leaving family and embarking on their collision course. Muse, in an Oscar-worthy supporting role, was never a bad guy: every man in his village wanted to go with him – it was an act that was accepted by their desperate society; and even moreso it was required by the warlord above them. His courage and Captain Phillips’s were certainly equal; and they both used their brains. If Captain Phillips won the battle, it was only because he had more worldly experience, plus the technology and firepower of the U.S. Navy behind him. Without condoning piracy, the movie made you sympathetic to the pirates: it was the Americans who tricked and lied and killed in cold blood – understandable in the circumstances, but not the kind of heroism we’re used to cheering at the movies. In short, at every stage of the movie, I had to check on my feelings: whom was I rooting for, and why? The film was also wonderfully shot and edited; I felt the claustrophobia of being on the tanker and I felt I was living through the crisis almost in real time.
Two caveats only: Tom Hanks was wonderfully expressive, but he never convinced me that he was either a ship captain or a New Englander. And although the story came from real life and must be accurate, we could never understand why the ship’s owner, let alone its insurer, would send it through pirate-infested waters without a security guard or two who could have easily gunned down the pirates before they had a chance to board.
A sweet film about one spunky girl’s efforts to break through the repression of women in Saudi Arabia. By making her statement an attempt to acquire, and ride, a bicycle, the director kept the rebellion personal, low-key, understandable and touching. And by making the repressers women, not men, there weren’t villains to root against, just Saudi society. In all, it was a fascinating insight into another culture, somewhat stilted, but a small gem.
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