“Coco,” Nov. 28, 2017, theater. Bronwen and I both really enjoyed this gorgeous, engaging, sentimental spectacular from Pixar. This one follows the journey of Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) a little boy who seeks his musical muse and ancestor who, he believes, was a great Mexican musician and film star (Benjamin Bratt). The rest of his family…
Maudie
“Maudie,” Nov 11, 2017 (2016), DVD, home. Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke star in this deeply emotional biopic about Maude (Dowley) Lewis and her husband Everett She’s crippled with arthritis; he’s damaged by abuse, illiteracy, and whatever biological-emotional wounds he’s carrying with him in life. She’s been shunted and taken advantage of by family members;…
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2
“Guardians of the Galaxy, V. 2,” Nov. 10, 2017 (2017), DVD, home. Yes, this is very silly and the language is just plain dumb, as aliens tell one another “you suck”. It is also so terra-centric as to be ridiculous. Ok. Despite that, I really enjoyed this playful Marvel Comic frolic that follows Peter Quill…
Bringing Up Baby
“Bringing Up Baby,” October 14, 2017 (1938-Black and White), DVD, home. This is probably really going to irritate people, especially those who are more film savvy than I am. I know this is one of the most beloved films ever made and, for many folks, one of the best – if not the best…
Dunkirk
“Dunkirk,” (2017) August 15, 2017, theater, 70 mm. When I was a kid, I read a novel about Britain in the early days of WWII. It ended with the disappearance of the old man who takes his boat to Dunkirk to try to help rescue the troops trapped on the beach. I no longer…
Arrival
“Arrival,” August 2017 (2016), DVD, on laptop in Minnesota. The aliens have landed and linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is called upon to try to figure out how to communicate with them. She works along with physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) and the US military as fronted by Forest Whittaker as Col Weber (who I…
Detroit
August 8, 2017 (2017), theater. What a contrast to the last film I saw, “La La Land” Katheryn Bigelow’s docudrama about the Detroit riots of 1967, 50 years on, is a hard one to watch It is disturbing, depressing, horrifying, brutal and quite relentless as it focuses in on the Algiers Hotel where police sadism…
La La Land
“La La Land,” (2016) July 20, 2017, DVD, home. So yes, it was an homage to Hollywood musicals and movies past, and yes it was light, and yes, it was ‘clean,’ and yes everyone was young and beautiful, and yes it starred Ryan Gosling as Sebastian, the brilliant white jazz pianist committed to saving the…
The Accountant
“The Accountant,” (2016) May 20, 2017, DVD, home. The perfect film to watch on the day of the Bentley University commencement We both (and that is a surprise) enjoyed this Ben Affleck vehicle that asks and answers “what would Jason Bourne be like if he had savant skills and Asperger’s Syndrome?”. Is this Affleck’s…
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
“Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” (2016), May 14, 2017, DVD, home. Tim Burton’s interpretive transformation of Ransom Riggs’s wildly popular novel of the same name. I’d never read it before I saw this version, which includes many of Burton’s signature uses of skeletal monsters The movement between CGI and stop-action Claymation didn’t…
Moonlight
“Moonlight,” (2016), April 8, 2017, DVD, home. Superb look at 14 years in the life of a black man as he goes from child to adult Each “act” in the film looks at him at a different moment: elementary school, high school, and his early twenties The film features brilliant acting from the three who…
Lion
“Lion,” February 17, 2017 (2016), theater. We enjoyed and appreciated this tale of loss and love from India and Australia. Five-year old Sarroo (Sunny Pawar) from an impoverished Indian village family accompanies his brother on a scavenging mission and becomes separated from him and inadvertently winds up over a thousand miles away after becoming…
Denial
“Denial,” February 17 2017 (2016), DVD, homeThis drama chronicles the real libel case brought by English Holocaust denier and Hitler fanboy, Steven Bannon, I mean David Irving (played by the ever superb Timothy Spall) against American historian Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz). It’s an important case. Fought out in the English civil courts where the…
Captain Fantastic
“Captain Fantastic,” December 30, 2016 (2016), DVD, New York. Radical polymath Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife Leslie, have taken their family, which soon numbers six kids, into the wilds of Washington state to raise them in a program that challenges all their physical and mental properties. They are producing amazingly advanced kids who…
Manchester by the Sea
December 26, 2016, theater. We both liked this well-received Kenneth Lonergan written and directed piece about a Quincy, MA custodian, Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) called back to MbtS on the unexpected death of his brother, a local fisherman He has been living as a virtual penitent in relative isolation, fueled by alcohol and occasional violent…
Daughter [Dukhtar]
“Daughter [Dukhtar],” December 23, 2016 (2014), DVD, home. The tribal areas of Pakistan are truly tribal and the subject of this look at tribalism, gender and women in that area. And one should look at this film. It’s visually stunning, although there are some incredibly perplexing gaps in the story line and…
Coming Home
“Coming Home,” December 11, 2016 (2014), DVD, home [Chinese/subtitled. One of my all-time favorite living actresses, Li Gong (Feng) stars with Chen Daoming (Lu) in this Zhang Yimou drama of political oppression, love, amnesia, and devotion in post-Maoist China. Lu is an academic sent down on trumped-up charges as a rightist during the Cultural Revolution and,…
The Beatles: Eight Days a Week-The Touring Years
“The Beatles: Eight Days a Week-The Touring Years,” October 17, 2016, theater. Well done documentary looking at the Beatles as a concert band. Wonderful live concert footage of a story many of us lived, but its arc is that of exhaustion and disgust with touring as a band for teens as these men…
Free State of Jones
“Free State of Jones,” October 17, 2016 (2016), DVD. Primitive Baptist Confederate soldier Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey) deserts from the rebel army as he comes to understand the war as a rich man’s war/poor man’s fight. He takes up with a band of runaway slaves, draws other deserters, slaves and locals to him, and declares…
Hello
“Hello, My Name is Doris,”September 16, 2016 (2015), DVD. I know I’m not supposed to be embarrassed when I watch films like this, but they make me incredibly uncomfortable They somehow hit so close to home that they make me totally stressed out Sally Fields stars and does a wonderful job in this comic drama…
The Martian
“The Martian,” August 17, 2016 (2015), DVD. Team botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is inadvertently stranded on Mars when, thinking him dead, his team makes an emergency evacuation. He must manage to renew contact with Earth, stay alive, and manage an escape. This Ridley Scott film is the best sort of science fiction, as it’s…
Creed
August, 2016, DVD, computer. Who would have thunk it? Certainly not me I didn’t expect to enjoy this well-written, well-acted, and sentimental return of a series I thought long past its expiration date The ‘lost’ son of Apollo Creed goes to Philadelphia to bring Rocky out of retirement and to become the young man’s trainer…
Bridge of Spies
“Bridge of Spies,” July 17, 2016 (2015), DVD. Tom Hanks plays James Donovan, a NY insurance attorney asked to represent Soviet spy Rudolph Abel (Mark Rylance) in this based-on-a-true story Steven Spielberg tale of Cold War intrigue and double dealing which, in part due to Donovan’s skill, led to Abel’s exchange for Francis Gary…
Barton Fink
“Barton Fink,” July 2, 2016 (1991), DVD We were both drawn to and a bit weirded out by this darkly comic Hollywood psychodrama about film making in 1941/42 by the Coen Brothers. Coen Brothers regular John Turturro’s Fink is a newly crowned Broadway playwriting phenom prone to spouting platitudes about. and writing about the…
Carol
“Carol,” June 18, 2016 (2015), DVD. Todd Haynes period romantic melodrama (1952-53) stars the wonderful Kate Blanchett as the wife/mother title character in an unhappy marriage, and chronicles her affair with Therese Belivet (Roony Mara), a talented, artistic photographer earning her living as a department store clerk. It follows the characters through Carol’s…