Category: Film Reviews

I saw this one in Minneapolis at Erica’s home. We both enjoyed this 2007 Peter Berg-directed look at anti-American terrorism in Saudi Arabia and the follow-up to car bombings at an American complex. Starring Jamie Foxx as an American FBI guy who, along with Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper, and Jason Bateman go off to SA…

I never saw this 1966 British comic trifle before, and Bronwen is on a Charlotte Rampling jag, so we watched and enjoyed this one as the period piece it is. It’s heavily influenced by the long history of Brit absurdist comedy that would, in just a couple of years, yield Monty Python. This one sits…

I saw this when I was about 10 or 12 and enjoyed it once again on DVD. Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy—older, more tired, but real chops!) is seeking his fifth term as mayor of a New England city a la Curley in Boston. His machine is truly that, a machine. He loves the power, isn’t…

I really disliked the first hour of this introduction to Peter Jackson’s latest New Zealand-shot Middle East trilogy. Too sweet and too much like a kid’s story with silly dwarves everywhere. Bilbo (Martin Freeman) is the complacent Hobbit lured from the Shire by Ian McKellan’s Gandolf and the 13 “dwarves without a country” led by…

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 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…

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…