Category: Film Reviews

Bronwen and I both really liked seeing this 1991 Chinese drama about a blind banjo player and his blind apprentice again. The master believes he will regain his sight when he breaks his 1,000th string. Hoping against hope, he moves forward with increasing intensity and desperation. Known as a saint, he resolves conflicts among clans,…

Bronwen, Bronwen, and I all liked this shift from the book to the movie about the young wizard who goes to school at Hogwarts Acadamy. Fun special effects and scary too. Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith are marvelous as teachers at the school, and everyone is really first rate. A fun story for all full…

Boring film that refuses to take risks with fantasy and plotline about an aspiring opera singer who flees the alter in Venezuela and runs to Paris. She lives with other Latinos, and makes her way in the city. Could have been so much more. Subtitled

Both Bronwen and I enjoyed this very nice Italian romantic comedy (subtitled) about a married woman finding herself in the big city of Venice. On a bus holiday with her ingrate family, she’s accidentally left behind at a rest area. Instead of waiting for her plumbing supply entrepreneur husband and her two teenage sons to…

Both Bronwen and I liked this film about love, parents and children, music, and passion. It is a very humane, rich, and fascinating non-linear study that follows a violin from creation during the 17th century in Italy to its latest sale at auction in Canada. The film travels, with the violin, around the globe. The…

Both Bronwen and I liked this interesting film written and directed by Tim Robbins, although I think I enjoyed it more because it hit on more stuff I know well. It compresses lots of stuff into a short historical frame, including stuff that didn’t happen at that time, but it is fiction not history. The…

Both Bronwen and I liked this interesting look at the Manchester England punk/new wave scene of the late 1976-late 1980s. Seen through the eyes of the Tony Wilson, Granada-tv interviewer, smug elitist intellectual, and rock host turned impresario (he himself minimizes his role as anything but facilitator), it chronicles the emergence of indie rock, punk…

Based on a true story and characters with an excellent mini-documentary feature attached. It’s 1984 in London and the miners are on strike as Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party move against one of the last bastions of union power in Britain with police and scabs with the goal of closing many pits. A gay…

Both Bronwen and I loved this 2003 look at characters we first saw in 1987. I didn’t like the first one that much, quite frankly, all talk and no content. Sex was there but never there. This one is much better. The leftist Remy, a failed teacher, lothario, and non-publishing American historian (yikes!) is dying…

Based on a true story. Interesting and engaging look at a rather unhappy couple and their daughter who, as Jews, have fled Germany. Jettel (a beautiful daughter of the Jewish bourgeoisie) follows Walter (a former lawyer) to Kenya where they work farming for others. She is miserable and angry at him and her lot; he…

Both Bronwen and I really enjoyed this bizarre fantasy about a geeky puppeteer who finds a passageway into JM’s brain, rents trips, and then takes over the actor. In the process he losses both his wife and the woman he is infatuated with. About control, love, gender bending, lust, art, creativity. Starring JM but mostly…

January 17, 2016, theater. Based on Michael Lewis’s book, this creative, funny, terrifying, and infuriating movie chronicles the meltdown of 2007/8 and the housing bubble, financial skullduggery, and almost universal corruption among the banks, Wall Street high flyers, the political establishment, and the financial media that led us lemmings over the cliff into crisis,…and then…

Brilliant, four-hour look at a man (Jean Paul Bellmondo) whose life parallels Jean Valjean’s life and the story by Hugo. Set during WWI-WWII period. Serious and very meaningful look at antisemitism. Excellent cast, very well written. A wonderful movie. Subtitled. See this film!

Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) is a recently retired Argentine investigator/counselor with two obsessions: a horrific rape/murder case long concluded but not resolved because of the intervention of the dictatorship, and Irene Hastings (Soldedad Villamil), his former boss (now a judge) and permanent unrequited love. He begins to write a novel about the case and it…

Best Actor, Gary. Oldman. Europe is collapsing beneath the Nazi onslaught and Britain increasingly stands alone. To build a war cabinet, Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) resigns and the Conservatives accept their black sheep, Winston Churchill, who is acceptable to Labor, although he disrespects them. The Tories – and the King (Ben Mendelsohn) – would prefer…

Best Picture Oscar for this Ben Affleck vehicle about the rescue of the 6 hostages from the Canadian ambassador’s house in Teheran in 1980, a momentary bright spot in a terrible two years. Everyone looks as they did and shines in this “so crazy it just might work” (someone actually says, “here’s where someone should…

Best seen on the big screen, this is a meditation on American history and culture from director Kelley Reichart and screenwriter Jonathon Raymond (“Wendy and Lucy”). It picks up a wagon train lost mid-stream in 1845 as they struggle to make their way to Oregon. It is a moment in history where nothing is yet…

Bizarre trip into NYC by a dysfunctional LI family trying to find out if the husband (Stanley Tucci) of one daughter. is having a fling with a woman named Sandy. Very dark. Anne Meara is great as the tyrant mother. Everyone calls this a comedy, and it is funny, but it is very painful. Parker…

Bizarre, surreal Greek fantasy of a family isolated in a compound. The family as fascist, patriarchal authoritarian model and what happens when the world outside begins to intrude. Very brutal, weirdly comical in points, and very disturbing. Sexual but utterly flat and unemotional in its sexuality. A new vocabulary to mask meaning. Bark like a…

Blech. Don’t bother. Except for Leslie Jones as Patty, who got the tone right, this was a serious waste of comedic talent for the three other women starring in the film as well as my time

Bobby (Ben Affleck) is a 160 k/yr hot-shot 36-yo salesman for GTX Corp in their ships division when he and 5,000 other workers are laid off when the division is closed to improve the Co’s bottom line. His sales boss, Gene (Chris Cooper), follows shortly thereafter and the layoffs waged by the corp head (Craig…

B4 and I watched this Michael Moore jeremiad about the American health system at home. It’s long, with some really painful truths about how awful we are and we don’t even know it or, worse yet, simply lie to ourselves that everything’s ok. Boy, I really envy the French. Our society is going down the…

B4 and I watched this Steve Correll/Anne Hathaway (Smart/99) vehicle reframing the silly TV show of the 1960s. that was the logical extreme of the Bond/Secret Agent/I Spy/Man from UNCLE cycle. Correll’s fun, but too old by far for Hathaway. The Rock plays the superagent all aspire to be and bed. It’s not as bad…

Antonio is the English and Latin teacher we all wish we had in what appears to be a sex-segregated middle school in 1966. He uses Beatles songs to reach his students and wishes he had those lyrics down more precisely. If only the Beatles included lyric sheets with their albums. He also protects his students…

B4 is at a party so we went to the movies and what a movie!. This is a violent, shocking, brilliant film from the Coen Brothers about a drug deal gone wrong in 1980, and the simple Texas hunter (Josh Brolin) who finds the millions left over from the deal. To say the least, it…