Category: Film Reviews

I survived this one, although it put Bronwen to sleep. Where are Steve Reeves, Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, and Howard Fast when we need them most?. In the early 1960s, Spartacus praises the slaves rising against their masters. Here the slaves struggle to free Rome from the bad emperor to create. . the slave-based Republic?….

I really enjoyed and was moved by this Martin Scorcese homage to early filmmakers and French culture. Hugo is an orphan who lives in the interstices of a Paris train station where he minds the time and mends machines. He meets and is befriended by Isabelle, a lovely young orphan girl cared for by Papa…

I really enjoyed the first 2/3 of this interesting Spike Joynz/Charles Hoffman collaboration about trying to write a screenplay about Suzy Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. The last third degenerates into the Hollywood chase/murder stuff that the film is, in fact, a critique of. Nicholas Cage plays Hoffman and his “brother” Donald and does a fine…

I really enjoyed the trilogy that provides the basis for this first film. I liked this true-to-tale vision of the book. It’s very well done and very creepy indeed. Nicely acted. Very disturbing film. One difference from the book is in the ending as to why L and B leave things as they do. The…

I really enjoyed this 2010 slaughter-fest action drama from Takashi Miike. Thirteen men, mostly samurai (led by Koji Yokusho—”Shall We Dance”!) including a Ronin and men in training, but also some commoners, band together in 1844 at the behest of the councilor to the Shogun to kill their lord’s evil, sadistic and pathological brother who…

I really enjoyed, frequently laughed out loud, and was also more than a little disturbed by this wacky Boots Riley vehicle He wrote and directed. He’s the frontman for The Coup, a radical hip hop band that’s influenced by folks like George Clinton. I play their albums with some regularity on my show. I found…

I really liked this bizarre look at the life of Chuck Barris, game-show creator, culture degrader, and, he says, CIA assassin. The perfect post-modern film. There is no reality but the story and who knows what’s real. Nice direction and acting by George Clooney, with a fine star turn by Julia Roberts. Really fun and…

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…

I loved this vulgar romp from the creators of the TV show. The music is often funny and includes such wonderful anthems as “Blame Canada”. Yes, it’s not correct by any stretch of the imagination. Yes, Saddam Hussein is played as more evil than the devil. Satan, after all, is looking for real love. But…

I liked this Disney Oscar-winning animated film of girl power, good songs, and magic. The trick is accepting yourself and controlling/using your emotions. Don’t trust princes who don’t stand a chance to inherit on their own. Each of us has known an ice princess

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