Category: Film Reviews

Another con/heist flick with Cooney and the gang, including Julia (well, not intentionally at first). It’s ok until it just becomes too cute about her looking like Julia Roberts. Fun in parts and worth watching just to see the gang work together again, including Reiner, Pitt, Roberts, along with Catherine Zeta Jones, but nowhere near…

A slow, sad, painful look at a 15-year old Chinese girl sent from the city to the countryside. It is about her betrayal by the party (sent there for no reason, sent deeper into the steppes for even less reason) and the local party men who sexually use her as she desperately tries to get…

A good film to see on the ‘Glorious Fourth’. We both liked (?) and appreciated this Oscar-winning Best Film from last year documenting the travails of Solomon Northrup. (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an African-American free man stolen through nefarious means and sold into the sickness of racial slavery in the Deep South, a land of cotton and…

A small comic drama about three unemployed guys in Jersey City who try to turn to crime, but can’t cut it at all. Nicely acted with some good bits, especially by Vincent Gallo (boy, is this guy good!), William Forsythe, and Francis McDormett (she can do anything!). A nice, if occasionally dumb and funny movie…

A good if hokey piece of work about two old men who become real uncles to a young boy in Texas. Fun stuff with Robert Duvall and Michael Caine (especially Duvall) doing very good work. Way too pat, politically incorrect, and fun to watch, it’s nonetheless romantic, full of silliness and racial stereotypes, and good…

A strangely underwhelming and disappointing feature detailing the struggles of a young girl to bring the last “golden compass” to her scientist Uncle in the frozen north of a parallel universe. She has to fight against the “Magisterium,” an authoritarian religious system a la Catholicism-cum-Stalinism, especially in the person of Nicole Kidman’s Mrs Coulter She…

A good nature documentary about the emperor penguins of Antarctica. These individuals and this community struggle to reproduce in one of the most hostile environments in the world. Well photographed and narrated by Morgan Freeman, although they are anthropomorphized too much. Still, see this one

A good prequel for the series it follows the origins and identities of Kirk, Spock, Uhuru, Checkov and Sulu in an alternate universe transformed by the future. The actors bear an uncanny resemblance to the old gang and are loose and comfortable in front of the cameras in ways the older group never was. Nimoy…

A good, entertaining presentation about the Irish struggle to overthrow English rule and the internal struggles over liberation and the creation of the Irish Republic. Well acted by Liam Nesson and Adain Quinn. Alan Rickman as DeValera, the weak pretentious self-serving villain, starts well, but becomes too wimpy/crazy to be real. Julia Roberts does nothing…

A good, troubling, and linear thriller about the effect of finding $44 million on four normal (and abnormal) folks in the Midwest. A tale of deceit, despair, loss, self-delusion and self-destruction. Painful to watch but worth staying with this one. Well acted by Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton (will he always play retarded rurals?), and…

A look at Auschwitz today through the eyes of Sven, a fictional German youth serving his national service by working at Auschwitz helping out. It is a remarkable film by Robert Thalheim, the auteur/director who spoke at the screening. A film about the contradictions of living history and the commercialized holocaust shot in hell itself….

A lovely, sad, funny, humane Italian story (pure fiction) about a postman and Pablo Neruda. Handled with grace, it skirts the borders of mawkishness but stays calm and, unlike “Cinema Paradiso,” avoids excessive melodrama. See this film!. Subtitled

A marvelous Chinese/Hong Kong film about a couple (man and woman) who get together and have an affair when they learn their spouses are trysting their business trips away together. This is a stately, beautifully photographed and chaste drama about love unrealized and opportunities lost due to propriety and obligation. A lovely film. See this…

A nice (not great, but nice) and engaging remake of the 1974 classic Disney dog flick/novel, this follows a young boy through the joy and tragedy of owning a pair of wonderful hunting hounds. Set in hardscrabble rural Oklahoma in 1935, a boy earns enough to buy a pair of coon-hunting hounds and becomes very…

A nicely acted film that is more fun to watch than to think about. It’s literate, intelligent, very funny, and strangely false. This film stars Michael Douglas as a very stoned, successful novelist with terror in his heart. His younger wife (#4?) leaves him. He teaches writing and has, in his class, a disturbed and…

A not very funny French comedy about adultery. I found it depressing, but that may just reflect my fear of adultery and bisexuality these days. Subtitled

A rare film for me that I disliked enough that I decided not to finish. I found the script and the acting wooden, although I have increasingly enjoyed both Daniel Craig and Adam Driver. Sadly, a boring heist film set in the big money arena of car racing. I took it home because it received…

A silly and very funny movie about these two cartoon morons on the road. I really liked it!

A silly bit of well-meaning fluff about beauty contests and a female FBI agent sent undercover to find out who’s trying to sabotage the contest. Fun work from Sandra Bullock and Michael Caine (as the pageant consultant who makes her the woman she has inside her) but it’s otherwise not worth much at all. A…

Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown”. Whoops, no its not but the resemblance of this 2010 Polanski mystery/thriller to his 1974 classic detective mystery/thriller is palpable. The apolitical Ghost (Ewan McGregor) wins the assignment to help a former Brit PM (Pierce Brosnan, charismatic and soulless as the Blair-like official) write his memoir after the first ghost…

A good Czech film about skirt-chasing bachelor who makes a marriage of convenience with a Russian woman as the collapse is happening in Eastern Europe. She then splits on him and leaves him with her 5-year old son. Works on a variety of levels. He’s a musician who can’t have serious relationships, who becomes an…

“The Devil’s Backbone” 8 May 2010, DVD. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Mexican, “Pan’s Labyrinth”) and produced by the Almodovar brothers, this political Spanish ghost story is set in the final days of the Spanish Civil War. A boy’s school for the orphans of the war (Republican only) is haunted by the spirit of one…

1944 loose, Fritz Lang directed version of Graham Greene novel (according to film historian remarks included as a feature, GG did not like the adaptation). Ray Milland stars as a man released from a mental asylum after serving two years for having killed his wife. He goes to a country fair before taking the train…

1949 Japanese noir from Akira Kurosawa. Detective, former soldier Murakami (Toshiro Mifune) has his pocket picked on a bus during a brutally hot drought in immediate post-war Japan. His gun is stolen and he frantically sets out to retrieve it. He becomes increasingly despairing as the gun figures in several violent crimes. He teams up…

1999 remake of old 60s caper flick, this one with Pierce Brosnan as Crown and Rene Russo as Catherine Banning. There is NO chemistry between Brosnan and Russo although she looks very good without her clothes on. Dennis Leary is good as the cop. Crown is very rich and steals for fun and to own…