Village Vidiot

This is a marvelous Chinese film about a child prodigy violinist and his peasant father. The father, seeking the best for his child, sacrifices everything to get him to the city for lessons. It is a lovely and humane film. Really worth watching. See this film

This is a funny, kind, largely loving look at an African-American barbershop in Chicago. Calvin (Ice T) inherits the shop from his father but has greater dreams for himself. Life in the shop provides a look at the community and this very important institution. Some fine acting from Cedric the Entertainer, Eve, Anthony Anderson, and…

This is a fine French film about Lolita, the overweight daughter of a renowned novelist with a trophy wife barely older than the daughter. She is desperate for her father’s affection (he’s narcissistic and so is she). Indeed, her unpleasant characteristics are part of the film’s strength. She’s tried acting and now wants to be…

This interesting but overblown and melodramatic look at female insecurity chronicles a tough, accomplished, and renowned woman lawyer and prosecutor (Tilda Swinton) through her work life and very active and very bisexual love life. Despite great success in the courtroom and her soon-to-be appointment as a judge, she is utterly insecure and destructively self-critical about…

This film really worked for a cautionary tale about allowing a system to arrest people in relation to their ‘future’ acts. Very well done by S Spielberg, with a fine job by Tom Cruise, it only breaks down in the last 15 minutes or so. Otherwise, a fine take on the Philip K Dick story….

This film about an Indian wedding and culture in the “world’s largest democracy” started slowly, with set pieces that were predictable, but it evolved rapidly into a captivating piece about family and class in India, about love and obligation, about what matters to people. It is really well acted. The work by the man who…

This excellent and very strange Icelandic film looks at a Japanese businessman who goes to Iceland to perform a religious ritual for his parents but discovers much about himself and the world in the process. Very nasty vision of some American thug/hitchhikers played wonderfully by Lily Taylor and Steven Fischer. Well worth seeing and a…

This 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 defense must prove its innocence and the…

This documentary revisits the issues raised by “Pumping Iron” almost 40 years ago, following new competitors. Arnold and Lou make appearances of course and Mickey Rourke narrates as the reigning king, Phil Heath, goes head to head with Kai Greene and others. Each individual’s style, personalities, backgrounds, is shown shaping the event and the competition….

This documentary recounts the rise of anti-gay legislation in Uganda and the opportunistic and profoundly perverse role played by US evangelical missionaries in building this movement. Another painful and disturbing story of overt meddling and the money and power at stake in this battle here and in Uganda

This deeply affecting documentary chronicles the story behind a story. In 1980, three adopted young men, all from Jewish families, accidentally discovered that they were triplets, separated and adopted by three very different families, at birth. What follows is their joyous reunion, their early acclaim and momentary celebrity, and the questions that then flowed from…

This biopic stars Dev Patel as S Ramanugan, the brilliant, self-taught Indian mathematician, and Jeremy Irons as GH Hardy, the Cambridge math don he worked with during the years preceding and during WWI. Leaving his young wife at home in India, he sought to find his way through a cold and unwelcoming Britain, where even…

This badly done Barbara Streisand vanity piece is a real embarrassment. Nick Nolte does well in several scenes, the story has some life as a gothic tale of southern depravity, and George Carlin as the gay neighbor is wonderful and really steals the show, but it is, otherwise, a waste. Streisand is unbelievable, in the…

This ambitious conceit examines the issue of consciousness as one man sleeps? Dies? It is interviews animated over. A fascinating film worth seeing in this age of boring crap. Still, do not see it as I did, while exhausted after watching “Italian for Beginners”. I fell asleep

This “Star Wars” series, Ron Howard directed, Lawrence and Jonathan Kasden written, prequel gives us Han’s backstory following him from street thief to pilot and good guy criminal. Raised in privation, he (Landen Ehrenreich) flees and joins the imperial military before hooking up with criminal freebooters (led by Woody Harrelson) working for an intergalactic syndicate….

Third of the year, third in the theater. First time in a long time. We both enjoyed this slow, tense, atmospheric piece, where character, dialogue, acting, and story line carry this John LeCarre story/film in an ambiguous world of grey people and deceit. Gary Oldman as George Smiley (reprising the role done so brilliantly by…

They’re lying to one another. Forget it. Boring despite a couple of funny jokes

They do take us into the neutered SEC. I

There were more than a few times when I expected a very young Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky” to emerge on the stage and spit some lines along with our heroine, Patti Dumbrowski, aka, “Killer P” (a wonderful Danielle Macdonald—and Australian no less!). The story lines by writer-director Geremy Jasper track in many ways in this tale…

There is nothing remotely believable about this Justin Bateman-Melissa McCarthy comedy about a boring middle class accountant, Bateman, (the only accountant in the country paid 50k) whose identity is stolen by wacko sociopath, shopaholic McCarthy. He runs off to Florida to save his career in a cockamamie plan to bring her back to Denver so…

There is much to recommend this documentary story of Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet. An early and standout gay activist, he succumbed to AIDS in 1991. He was a founder of Act UP!, he figured in the major opening of gay life in post-Stonewall 1970s NYC and San Francisco. Interviews with friends and…

There are three movies in this Quentin Tarantino written/directed film about a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) who becomes a bounty-hunter along with his German liberator, Christoph Waltz in a brilliant turn. They work together killing white folk for the money and then go off to ‘rescue’ Django’s wife, now owned by the deranged, brutal Candie,…

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 script, some inexplicable and needless complications of the plot line, and…

The three of us went to see this one at the Capital. Bronwen and I really enjoyed it. Our daughter, who’d seen it three months before, was so dismissive that it really took a little bit of the fun out the thing. But just a little, because this movie is one hell of a lot…

The tensest and best of this fine action trilogy. We’d just watched the other two on DVD (B3 had never seen them). There’s lots of inter-textual stuff, so it actually would be good to see them again before you watch this. Jason Bourne sets out to find out who he is and how he became…