In BABYLON, Damien Chazelle has given us several films about the last hurrah of silent films and the birth of synchronized sound. Some of them are good, some of them are muddled, and one of them is superb. Chazelle’s ambitious attempt to encapsulate a time and place provokes respect for the effort, even when it… Read More »
THE LOST CITY
Let us praise the genius of Sandra Bullock’s gift for physical comedy. It makes even the small business of teetering on a stool in a fuchsia-sequined jumpsuit an epic of determination, embarrassment, grit, and uncertainty. It is in no small part that THE LOST CITY, on which she was also an executive producer, is such… Read More »
ONCE UPON A TIME . . . IN HOLLYWOOD
The 9th film from Quentin Tarantino, aka ONCE UPON A TIME . . . IN HOLLYWOOD, takes us back to 1969, and a land of fragile dreams, transactional relationships, and the manifestation of the dark side of it all in the form of Charles Manson (Damon Herriman). Manson himself has but a cameo in the… Read More »
ALLIED
There is an artistic license that we allow films that sweep us along when their emotional resonance is overpowering. Minor plot points that aren’t resolved, or factual errors. For an example of the latter, one need look no further than the Letters of Transit, desired by so many in CASABLANCA. No such thing. Yet it… Read More »
THE BIG SHORT
If there is one point THE BIG SHORT makes, it’s that just because something has never happened before, don’t make the mistake of thinking that it can’t. And that it takes someone with the comic sensibility of co-writer Adam McKay, a director known for THE OTHER GUYS and TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE LEGEND OF RICKY BOBBY, to… Read More »
BURN AFTER READING
It is a suitably perverse twist that the only person who has the clearest idea of what’s she is doing in the Coen Brothers latest offering, BURN AFTER READING, is Linda Litzke, the inadvertent femme fatale of the piece played by the miraculous Frances McDormand. Not the CIA operatives, not the Treasury Department guy, not… Read More »
MEGAMIND
MEGAMIND is a sophisticated story told with a droll, unpretentious air. The humor is broad, the philosophy subtle, and the animation is strictly for fun. The result is a film that kids can grow up with, and that adults can use to relive the best days of childlike innocence. The titular character, voiced with a… Read More »
WORLD WAR Z
Throughout the episodic and ultimately annoyingly unresolved WORLD WAR Z, we have the lovely face of Brad Pitt filling the screen. As U.N. investigator Gerry Lane, it is his story that leads us through another zombie apocalypse, starting with the odd happenings during his rush hour in Philadelphia, to his increasingly desperate globe-trotting in an… Read More »
COUNSELOR, THE
Once upon a time there was a delightful play that spawned an equally delightful movie, both called ROZENCRANTZ AND GUILDERSTERN ARE DEAD. In it, two minor characters from Hamlet are given center stage, with the arch comedy suitable to the comic relief from a towering tragedy, as well as unexpectedly profound observations about the meaning… Read More »
SINBAD: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SEAS
Dreamworks has taken a novel approach to their latest animated film, SINBAD: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SEAS. The studio has done an homage not just to adventure films from the 1950s, but more specifically, to the B adventure films from that era. Not that that’s a bad thing, they were fun in a kitschy way,… Read More »