There is a moment during Sam Mendes’ masterpiece of a film, 1917, where a character is permitted to remove himself from the overwhelming, unrelenting now, and process both the facts of what he’s been through and the conjecture about what he’s about to face. During this moment, George MacKay, playing the appropriately named Will, gives… Read More »
MARY POPPINS RETURNS
It’s a testament to just how good MARY POPPINS RETURNS is that the weakest part of this sequel to the 1964 film is the sequence with Meryl Streep. I hasten to point out the relative nature of the word “weakest”. Like everything else in this practically perfect cinematic exercise, it’s eye-popping and clever as the… Read More »
MAMA MIA!
ABBA, the songsters behind the soundtrack for the musical MAMA MIA!, play and now film, composed bouncy little ditties often revolving around a catch phrase or even just a catch word. Add safe, bubble-gum music and the results were songs that weren’t so much great art as something that would burrow into the listener’s brain… Read More »
CHRISTMAS CAROL, A
A great deal of money has been expended in order to bring the Robert Zemeckis 3D animated version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL to the screen. And yet, for all the showy set pieces that have Scrooge (Jim Carrey) hurtling through the stratosphere at breakneck speeds creating dizzying tableaux of impressively changing perspectives, every woman in… Read More »
SINGLE MAN, A
Colin Firth delivers a towering performance in Tom Ford’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A SINGLE MAN. The novel’s interior monologue has been externalized as an haute-couture fashion shoot, familiar territory for the fashion designer turned filmmaker. Instead of a cheap gimmick or a cheesy idiom, though, it’s the perfect subjective palette on which to play… Read More »
WHAT A GIRL WANTS
WHAT A GIRL WANTS is yet another reworking of the tried and true Cinderella formula. In this case tired and true might be more apt as this version has an American gal from New York breathing some life into stuffy old England. Would that screenwriters Jenny Bicks and Elizabeth Chandler had found a way to… Read More »
LOVE, ACTUALLY
LOVE, ACTUALLY takes upon itself the daunting task of presenting to us love in all its manifestations. Theres the fairy tale, the tragedy, the farce, the friendships and the betrayals all rolled up into a set of interwoven tales that charm but never pander, giving us the bitter with the sweet, the whimsy with the… Read More »
NANNY MCPHEE
There is something deeply satisfying about a fable with a time-honored story line that may offer no surprises as to plot points as it barrels along to its conclusion, but that does, nonetheless, pay strict attention to the serious moral lesson to be learned from it while also strictly adhering to a loopy, almost anarchic… Read More »
THE LAST LEGION
THE LAST LEGION tries to ride the coat tails of the Arthurian romances with a new take on who Arthur was, where his sword Excalibur came from, and how the Roman empire involved itself in mixing it all up into a proto-Camelot. And it does all of this without cracking an R rating. That, in… Read More »