A DANGEROUS METHOD is an exquisitely pointless film. It also features Keira Knightlys most off-putting performance to date, one that may go down as one of the most off-putting of all time, in any film, by any actor. The complicated relationship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) should be the perfect… Read More »
JACK RYAN – SHADOW RECRUIT
JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT harkens back to those taut Cold War spy thrillers of days gone by. Not the ones with the elements of fantasy to their supervillains, but the ones that took ordinary people who had chosen the spy game out of patriotic duty, not dry martinis, and put them and their loved ones… Read More »
KING ARTHUR
The legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table conjure up words such as magic, stirring, spellbinding, and timeless, none of which apply to Jerry Bruckheimer’s cinematic rendering. Except, maybe, the timeless part, because sitting through this seems like an eternity. Bruckheimer and director Antoine Fuqua have taken gold, as in the… Read More »
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN — DEAD MAN’S CHEST
The original PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL offered up the unexpected delight of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, a joyfully addled pirate redux. He shared top billing with his co-stars, Orlando Bloom as the stalwart Will Turner and Keira Knightly as the plucky Elizabeth Swann, but it was Depp… Read More »
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN — AT WORLD’S END
It’s as though the people involved with PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END gave a great deal of thought to where exactly they hadn’t taken their heroes, villains, and Jack Sparrow, who is both and neither. Singapore, for one, and so the sequence in the seamier parts of that location. The polar climes, and… Read More »
SILK
SILK, based on the novel by Alessandro Baricco, is a singularly uninvolving bit of piffle crafted as though those who made it were afraid of waking someone. The scenery is lovely, which is a good thing, because there is nothing else happening here worth seeing. And from this we learn a valuable lesson. Art direction… Read More »