Village Vidiot

Very depressing good film about an alcoholic drinking himself to death in Las Vegas. Nicholas Cage with Elizabeth Shue as the hooker who takes him in on his own terms. I sometimes find Cage doing lines as though they are poetry, and that’s a bit much. He overacts quite a bit. Similarly, the ending is…

Very creative, non-linear story from director Felix von Groeningen. Didier (Johan Heidenbergh) is a Belgian artist and former punk who plays banjo in, of all things, a bluegrass band. He meets Elise (Verlee Baetens) a tattoo artist with her own shop. Their love and relationship is playful and musical as he takes her into his…

Very brutal, well done piece of work Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning performance as Aileen Wournous, the profoundly damaged serial killer. She punishes men for the horrible abuses that frame her life. Her messed up affair with the naïve Selby Wall (Christina Ricci) is a caricature of male modeling. The prostitute turned provider becomes a mass murderer…

Very big and rather boring Russian story of their great hero. No, not the Eisenstein but the more recent one of the hero who does no wrong but defends the glories of the Orthodox world. Look out world, old mother Russia’s comin’ back!

Traditional and very effective boxing film from Ron Howard that shows the life and travail of James J Braddock, heavyweight champion of the world. It is a fundamentally conservative film starring Russell Crowe that ‘rejects’ collective action by workers. It also is a well made and good film that works on its own terms, pitting…

Too stylish and predicatble for my taste. This look at British eccentrics set right by a happy go lucky girl in the twenties won the critics’ hearts but not mine. Maybe it plays better on the big screen

Tony Gilroy’s (director/writer) follow-up to the Bourne series, this one concentrates on the lone survivor of the CIA’s parallel, simultaneous operations designed to build “better” operatives but undone in part by Bourne’s survival It takes Aaron Cross, a soldier modified virally to be s more successful killer, as he tries to find the drugs he…

Tommy Lee Jones stars in this unusual story of western retribution. When his friend Melquiado is killed (not accidentally but not for the reason originally thought) by a border guard, Pete (Jones) kidnaps the guard and takes him and, retrieving the corpse, journey’s to Mexico to force him to confront his crime. What a road…

Tomas is the fair-skinned adolescent son of a single mother in Veracruz. That matters as in Mexico he is denounced as a pale one or “guero,” (although I can’t get the umlaut over the u), a slur that suggests he’s not a real Mexicano. She just can’t keep him from acting out and, at her…

Tom Hardy plays Bob Saginowski, a bartender and small-time criminal working for his cousin Marv (James Gandolfini, wonderful to the end and greatly missed) in the latter’s bar in Brooklyn. Looking for a big score, Marv struggles against his own decline as a criminal facing the arrival of new, utterly brutal Chechen gangsters. Bob, on…

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 Powers, the U-2 pilot captured by the USSR after…

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 divorce, their road trip flight away from the…

Tina Fey and Steve Correll star in this fun and silly film about a couple from NJ who get really snarled up when they take someone else’s reservation at a hot new restaurant. This is a funny movie with a really silly plot and a very dumb ending, but the writing and work is lots…

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 always work for me I enjoyed aspects of the film quite a bit, but…

Thoughtful and interesting look at conflict in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964 when a priest (Seymour Philip Hoffman) is seen by the head nun ( Meryl Streep in a fine turn) as getting too close and behaving inappropriately with a student. Based on the Pulitze Prize-winning play by John Patrick Shanley. Very…

This well-crafted and such a French film chronicles a man fired from his job as a manager who constructs a false life with a fake new job and keeps up the pretense, lying to his family, swindling his friends and parents to raise money, and even becoming involved in smuggling to bring in some extra…

This was an interesting documentary on the pluses and minuses of building/working on Boston’s first real ‘green/environmental’ building, a luxury apt building in Southie, Boston. Good takes of workers, contradictions of local and global inputs.

This was a wonderful way for Harry Dean Stanton to go out as an actor, and he knew it. It was clearly a love letter to and also about him. Set in the desert somewhere, Stanton plays Lucky, a WWII Navy vet who served on LSTs at the Battle of Okinawa. Not surprisingly, so did…

This very funny, crude black date comedy really is worth seeing despite its reliance on sex and poop jokes. A good run at self-criticism by African-American comics

This very funny David Mamet version of Trufaut’s “Day for Night” works as a troupe of actors descends on a small NH town to make a film. Led by their director William Macy, they include a pedaphile, Alec Baldwin, and a shy leading lady, Sarah Jessica Parker, plus an idealistic author, Seymour Hoffman. Funny work…

This two-part Lars Van Triers effort looks at two sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsborough) as they both face their world ending through marriage (Dunst) and the mystery blue planet, Melancholia (all) that threatens the world in the second part. Wonderful acting from John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Alexander Skarsgard, and Kiefer Sutherland. This…

This thoughtful, beautiful and harsh Columbian film written and directed by Ciro Guerra, chronicles the journey of Octavio. Corrillo (Marciano Martinez, a renowned singer) a former troubadour and singer of vallenato, the lyric ballads of love, life and death in rural northeastern Columbia. He sets out on Ash Wednesday to return his accordion following the…

This Singaporian film (Anthony Chen’s debut feature), is the first from that nation to win an award at Cannes (Camera D’Or). It is a lovely, unsentimental—but not cold—look at the relationship between a difficult 10-year old boy whose hardworking parents are not home (the Chinese title, The Parents Are Not At Home) and the Philippina…

This rough film from Clint Eastwood stars Angelina Jolie as a mother in 1928 whose son disappears. She is desperate to get him back. The police substitute another kid. Indeed, the institutional corruption of the police is a key theme in the movie and is handled very well. It should feed into “Chinatown”. John Malkovitch…

This review is dedicated to the memory of Roger Ebert who died yesterday: on your work, one thumb very up!. Sixto Rodriguez’s two albums came and went from the music scene during the early 1970s without making a ripple here. With Dylan-esque lyrics, pacing like Tim Hardin, and a voice reminiscent of Tim Buckley, he…