Category: Film Reviews

I really liked this film about the young Che and a 9000 km trip around South America he took with a friend when he was 23/24. Wonderfully acted by both professional and non-professional actors (Bernardo Gael is great as Che and the guy who plays his friend is really marvelous). and directed with real skill…

I really liked this Oscar-winning look at (mostly female) backup singers in pop music including Darlene Love, Claudia Lennear, Lisa Fischer, Tata Vega, Merry Clayton, Patti Austin, Cheryl Crow, and Judith Hill, among others. It considers their place in the song and notes that in many cases they are the chorus for the audience (live…

I really liked this Paul Thomas Anderson written and directed Adam Sandler vehicle about an oppressed, henpecked misfit filled with rage who makes his way through life badly. He finds a soul-mate (Emily Watson) almost as weird as he is, but after an intense conflict with folks from Utah (the brothers, who are brothers) after…

I really liked this sci-fi, social commentary about aliens stranded and housed in shanty-towns outside Johannesburg, SA. Very well acted and weird piece by Peter Jackson. Both SA and US content. Creepy prawnlike aliens. What happens when we ‘cross over?’. B walked out of this one. Creeped her out way too much. Stick with it….

I really liked this unusual conceit of a film from Richard Linklater shot over 12 years using actors as they aged. So much could have happened to short circuit this project, but it came to fruition and produced a film that has everyday life, real tensions and personal evolution at its core. Some of my…

I may be the wrong person to review this one, since I don’t watch teen coming of age films with great regularity. Still, I was lured by the praises on the DVD box touting its comedic brilliance Will I ever learn?. There are a few laughs in this, but the answer is clearly no. So,…

I saw this at a salon-like DVD party at Bruce Sylvester’s and that was half the fun of it. Thanks Bruce. This is an odd family road trip movie written, directed, produced, etc by Allen Wagner. It stars his mom, dad, two sisters and several friends. The dysfunctional but long-lived Wagner family take a trip…

I liked this disturbing “based on a true story” look at the origin of The Beats at Columbia University in 1943-44. Allen Ginsburg (Daniel Radcliffe) leaves Patterson, NJ, his poet father and very disturbed mother, and goes to college where he encounters William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Lucian Carr and David Kamerrer. The movie follows their…

I liked this Dustin Hoffman-Emma Thompson vehicle for its fine acting through ¾ of the film. Its last quarter becomes happy melodrama where all is neatly resolved. Blech. Hoffman and Thompson really shine, the former as Harry Shine, a failing jingle writer from NYC. ET is the now older Kate Walker, a single woman caring…

I liked this gentle send-up of the folk scene and the culture of musical reunions as perpetrated for and by TV. Bronwen found it boring, irrelevant, and flaccid (perhaps like the scene itself as portrayed here, white, treacley-sincere, in some cases, just plain plastic and overproduced). I found that to be part of its sly…

I liked this Julian Schnabel look at the final years of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle who suffers a massive stroke and loses all ability to move but is fully there inside. It’s a story of will and determination as he learns to write a book by blinking each letter to an amazingly patient…

I liked this movie despite its flaws. Twins, one the school slut (Reese Witherspoon, great in Election), the other a geek (Toby Maguire) who lives for (in) a 1950s sitcom about a place too white and perfect for words, get zapped into the episodes in the 1950s. There are no words in the books, there…

I liked this older film with Jake Gyllenhall and Robert Downey. Very atmospheric and right for the times about the serial killer who terrorized San Francisco in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Never caught, the film makes a good case for who he really was. Based on the book

I liked this one, and Bronwen slept through it. Based on a 20 volume saga of the Napoleonic wars. With Russell Crowe in a good role. Presaging Darwinism, it gives a sense of how wars were fought at sea, how children fought those wars, and how small these ships really were. A good film

I liked this piece of mindless fluff, although B didn’t and I’m not sure what b- thought about it. Steve Martin all but steals the show in the role of a crazy sadistic dentist, and the plant otherwise stars It’s not Nicholson or Corman, but this tale of a race of carnivorous plants from outer…

I liked this quirky William H Macy vehicle from 2003. He’s the unluckiest man in Vegas, where he’s employed as a cooler, whose mere presence lowers the boom on winners. Alex Baldwin shines in this as the mobster-manager of the Shangri-La, an old-style casino faced with significant competition from newer houses in the new ‘family-friendly’…

I liked this self-congratulatory Howard Stern autobiography despite myself. It’s funny and crude and pokes fun at the right people. Still, I don’t trust him.

I liked this third episode in the continuing saga of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) from director Richard Linklater. It’s written by the three of them. It now finds them older, with twin daughters, living in Paris but vacationing in Greece. They’re trying to deal with the real stresses of being older, being…

I liked and was really disturbed by this twisted, very well-acted and well-written Korean mystery/thriller. A drunken and sort of obnoxious Korean salary man is kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years before being inexplicably released, given money and sent on a mission to find his captor. His wife his dead, his young daughter gone, his…

I liked this true-to-the-story version of v2 of Stieg Larson’s “Girl” trilogy (Swedish-subtitled) but found it a little flat in affect Perhaps because this is the transition, but it just seemed emotionally distanced. Well acted. I’ve become more comfortable with Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth, although I still don’t see her character as this beautiful. More problematic…

I liked this ambiguous adaptation of Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize-winning novel directed by Rikesh Batra. Curmudgeonly Tony Webster (an excellent job by the wonderful Jim Broadbent), curt, distant and formal, receives word of a bequest from the mother of an old flame, the diary of another old, deceased friend, and it sparks a host of…

I liked this very dark, Chilean drama from director Pablo Larrain (he directed the just-released film “Jackie”), about priests moved from their parishes for ‘bad deeds,’ (pedophilia, trading in babies, providing confession to criminal state actors during Pinochet’s junta and keeping records of their crimes). They’re cared for by a ‘nun’ with her own tale…

I liked this conclusion to the Batman trilogy, although it is a brutal, violent, and disturbing look at life. Well acted by all. It is a caricature of the anarchist vision as a mask for the justification for mass annihilation

I loved this tasteless romp about love and lust. Wonderful work by Carmen Diaz, Ben Stiller, Chris Elliot, and Brad Dillon. Totally in bad taste and very funny. It is a complete Y-chromosome movie. I’ve not spoken to an adult woman who liked the film, although my students (male and female) did. Bronwen hated the…

I liked this dark look at the death. of George Reeves (good work from Ben Affleck although he never ages like Reeves did). What, you don’t remember George Reeves?. Before there was Christopher Reeves there was George Reeves, the real Superman. This film looks at the last 10 years of his life and his death…