Category: Film Reviews

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 enjoyed Woody Allen’s very popular fantasy about a screenwriter from CA (Owen Wilson) in Paris with his obnoxious fiancé and her repulsive bourgeois parents. He adores the city, she could care less. They meet friends of hers by chance and they are the kind of pompous, pseudo-intellectual pedants Allen’s been ranting against since “Sleeper”…

I felt like I wanted to blow the whole thing up

I found this documentary interview/documentary of former Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by Errol Morris both very interesting and frustrating. Rumsfeld is smug, smart, and utterly cloaked in his own ideological balderdash. He has done none of the thoughtful introspection that characterized Morris’s excellent “Fog of War” with Robert McNamara. We are getting the…

I forced B and b to watch this with me again. They hated it, I liked it, although I must admit it wasn’t as funny as it seemed when I saw it the first time in 1999. Doesn’t age perfectly, to be sure. Oh well, neither have I

I have really enjoyed Sasha Baron Cohen’s work in the past. I loved much of. “Borat”. I really liked his work in “Hugo” and “Talladega Nights”. He is, paradoxically, calculating and fearless. That’s why I was so disappointed in this film about a sociopathic dictator from somewhere (Middle East, Central Asia, N Africa?) who is…

I don’t usually like concert movies. They usually don’t capture my imagination or really please me. I just don’t care for the pyrotechnics. This Eric Clapton/Ravi Shankar festival recorded a year after George’s death in 2001 (how can that be?) is a real exception. If you haven’t seen it do!. The first Indian/Western fusion pieces…

I know that most progressive critics disliked this animated Pixar piece about superheroes forced to deny themselves (it’s all in the blood, superheroes are born not made, it’s biology over environment, normals are totally fickle/superheroes are true to their nature), but all of us liked this engaging and very funny film. Wonderful send-ups of Edith…

I enjoyed parts of this Robert Downey, Jr vehicle despite myself. A mediocre plot with way too much action, I’m a Holmes traditionalist (no shock there), he and Watson (Jude Law) set out to thwart the plans of an evil cult to take over the government with faux magic and terror. Downey and Law are…

I liked “Ocean’s 11” a lot, enjoyed “Ocean’s 12,” and was bored by “Ocean’s 13”. This one is an all-female crew headed by Sandra Bullock as Danny Ocean’s sister Debbie and Kate Blanchett as her friend Lou lead their own gang to conduct a massive jewelry heist. Co-starring Anne Hathaway (surprisingly good),. Mindy Kalling as…

I enjoyed the film that really is a prequel, setting up Ricardo Montalban’s magic pecs, Corinthian leather, and Herman Melville fetish. It ‘explains’ and reframes the arrival of Kahn and his merry band of ubermenchen. Yes, there are things that don’t work:. why does one shot lay Kahn out like a carp at one moment…

I liked (?) this Robert Reich look at the ever-growing inequality in American society and the terrible cost it takes on us as people and as a people. Very much about his life, being short, and being vulnerable. The Clinton years and his view of both Bill and Hillary are less clear and critical than…

I enjoyed this ‘based on a true story,’ Will Smith vehicle about Chris Gardner, a struggling bone density machine salesman, as he tries to take care of his family and, after his wife leaves, his son while risking all to make an unlikely career leap into becoming a stock broker. For some weird reason (and…

I enjoyed this 2013 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language film from Italy although it bored Bronwen. It owes much to Fellini as it chronicles Rome’s superrich and mostly bored, foolish, banal, and sometimes very talented intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals and faux-prelates as they party and perform (what’s the difference?) their lives away. It’s viewed through…

I enjoyed this death-fest set in

I enjoyed this Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle more than Bronwen. When Keaton, caretaker for her aged and infirm father and aunt, comes down with leukemia, she calls on her estranged sister (Streep) who arrives with crazy son LD in tow. I find it a nice, and all things considered, reasonably unmelodramatic look…

I enjoyed this hagiographic biopic about the great Jewish slugger. He provided wonderful heroics for American Jews during the 1930s and 40s. But that is its only point. It is well but endlessly made. Really nice interviews with lots of his fans, including Walter Mathau who realized he didn’t have to be a cutter in…

I enjoyed this new entry in this franchise. Ryan Gosling plays K, a replicant blade runner, or cop who goes after rogue replicants, in 2049. He’s at the bottom of the cop and replicant heap as he kills his own kind. He’s appropriately as flat as Gosling usually is, a loner who lives with a…

I enjoyed this thoughtful flick that contains action, tension and some real character development. Starring Tom Hanks in the title role of a smart and genuine person under immense pressure, it looks at Somali piracy in the Indian Ocean. Barkhad Abdi as Muse, the leader of the pirate boarding party dealing with his own pressures…

I enjoyed this version of the Michael Lewis look at Billy Beane and his efforts to transform baseball with cybermetrics. Brad Pitt as Beane works as does Seymour Philip Hoffman as Art Howe (the A’s old-school manager). I found Jonah Hill as Peter Brand (a tribute to his costar in Get Him to the Greek?),…

I enjoyed this very funny, rude, inappropriate, crude Seth McFarlane fantasy about a lonely little boy who whishes his teddy bear came alive and it does. It also grows up to be his slacker buddy, stoner, letch. With Mila Kundris who. is wonderful and amazing, Mark Whalberg as the grown up kid, and McFarlane as…

Hard to imagine that this is the first time I ever saw this John Sayles classic, but it’s, embarrassingly, true. A well-crafted tale about the Matewan coal wars in West Virginia. Chris Cooper is superb, Hazel Dickens sang most of the songs, and it does ring true. Sayles himself plays this very bizarre right-wing preacher….

I don’t get the rating system. A very, very tense fine drama from 2008 about two poor mothers: one white with an absent husband whose gambling has bankrupted the family in the impoverished part of Upstate New York, the other, a Mohawk widow who smuggles aliens into the US via the frozen river that has…

Hard to imagine, but I’ve never seen this 1952 classic of the Cold War western genre. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelley, Lloyd Bridges, and Henry Morgan, among others, tell the story of the sheriff (GC) who’s about to leave it all and go off with his new Quaker bride (GK) when he hears the baddest man…