THE COMEDIAN makes me want to forgive Robert De Niro for BAD GRANDPA. Almost.
PATRIOT’S DAY
PATRIOT’S DAY is two films, one perfectly competent, the other one a skillful blend of character study and taut suspense. Perhaps this is why the studio’s rep in San Francisco scheduled and cancelled not one, but two, For Your Consideration screenings for critics groups last month). Based on the events leading up to, during, and… Read More »
LIVE BY NIGHT
LIVE BY NIGHT is so sumptuously photographed that it can almost make up for its shortcomings. Based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane, it has weathered its translation by becoming a slight story heinously overblown. It also suffers from too many false endings. So many, in fact, that I can’t vouch… Read More »
SILENCE
Academics are taught to write with a dispassionate yet highly detailed style for their scholarly treatises. That is the approach that Martin Scorsese has taken with SILENCE, his philosophically dense and immaculately rendered film of Shusaku Endo’s book of the same name. The result is a maddening film more to be admired than enjoyed as… Read More »
PATERSON
PATERSON is the quintessence of everything Jim Jarmusch has done before. Playful in approach, deeply philosophical in meaning, it is a lyrical evocation of joy and sorrow as lived by a bus driver/poet during one eventful yet ordinary week in his life. The bus driver (Adam Driver), his route, and the city in which he lives… Read More »
WHY HIM?
Long before he was mild-mannered chemistry teacher turned fearsome drug lord on Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston made his mark in television comedy by, among other things, keeping Malcolm in the middle, and tending to Seinfeld’s teeth. Those comedic chops stand him in good stead for WHY HIM?, an intermittently hilarious hybrid of the buddy film… 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 »
HACKSAW RIDGE
Mel Gibson’s HACKSAW RIDGE begins with a quiet shot looking down (from heaven?) on corpses. They are horrific, with bits missing and gore everywhere. It’s a moment that will quickly give way to the battle of Okinawa that made them. Bodies ripped by bullets falling to the ground, others engulfed in flames running in panic.… Read More »
THE ACCOUNTANT
THE ACCOUNTANT is a flabby, overlong film with an earnest mission to make us all think differently about autism, and also to give us the cheap thrill of seeing justice meted out to those slimy financiers who manipulate high finance to the detriment of the little guys at the bottom of that particular food chain.… Read More »
GOAT
GOAT is not a subtle film, though the performances by its young cast are wonderfully nuanced. Based on the eponymous memoir by Ben Land, it opens with a mob of naked frat boys caught up in slow-motion frenzy of testosterone-driven, gleeful aggression. We do not see what it is that they are kicking, but we… Read More »
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