NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS is a cutesy and inane follow-up to the only slightly less cutesy and inane NATIONAL TREASURE. The plot feels like it was cobbled together from the sort of random ideas tossed out during the wee hours of the morning during an all-night brainstorming session, ideas that seem like genius when… Read More »
WALK HARD — THE DEWEY COX STORY
What SPINAL TAP did to and for the heavy metal documentary, WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY does to and for the musical bio-pic. With a fearless sense of silliness and a savage swipe at the conventions of the genre, it forges a brilliant parody that is relentlessly funny and musically acute. There is not… Read More »
THE ELIZABETH — THE GOLDEN AGE
ELIZABETH, THE GOLDEN AGE is as ambitious and as opulent as its predecessor, ELIZABETH. Both starring Cate Blanchett in the title role, both directed with panache by Shekhar Kapur, the former was a triumph in depicting the private Elizabeth subsuming her personal desires in order to become a national icon. The latter is a muddle… Read More »
THE SAVAGES
There are so many remarkable things about Tamara Jenkins’ THE SAVAGES that it’s hard to know where to start. The masterful performances are a given by pros Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jon and Wendy, siblings uncomfortable with the idea of family. There is also a subtly optimistic script about the end of… Read More »
CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR
Based on actual events, CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR tells the unlikely story of one even more unlikely man on a mission to make the world a better place. It’s a smart film, slickly done, with a disarming insouciance that belies the devastating political story it tells. Aaron Sorkin has taken the facts and with Mike Nichols… Read More »
THE TUDORS — THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
There is a cautionary lesson within THE TUDORS, the vibrant, lush, and suitably visceral mini-series depicting the life, loves, and politics of England’s Henry VIII. Henry, played with frank carnality by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, fancies himself a humanist, the fashionable thing to be during the Renaissance. Under the tutelage of Thomas More, soon to be… Read More »
THERE WILL BE BLOOD
When the question “Was that supposed to be a comedy”? floats to mind after a film is concluded, there is no answer that bodes well for said flick. Such is the case with THERE WILL BE BLOOD, Paul Thomas Anderson’s robust, and fitfully manic piece of work that takes Upton Sinclair’s classic novel, “Oil,” and… Read More »
PROTAGONIST
When Jessica Yu was offered financing to make a documentary about the ancient Greek playwright Euripides, she pondered the limitations of creating a biography about someone when the source material about his day-to-day life was thin at best. Instead, she came up with the radical idea to make a film about why his work still… Read More »
THE PIXAR STORY
There is nothing short of a giddy delight in watching the fine folks who founded PIXAR living out their dreams in ways much larger than even they could ever have imagined. It covers all the usual ups and downs of any show biz story, but PIXAR is not just any show biz entity, and the… Read More »
CASSANDRA’S DREAM
The funny thing, in the sense of odd rather than comedic, about CASSANDRA’S DREAM is that even though it is filmed in color, it is remembered in black and white. In Woody Allen’s lastest film, he returns to his consideration of morality, this time through the lens of classical Greek tragedy. Two brothers, Ian (Ewan… Read More »
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