Movie Reviews
Titles starting with R
The Road to Perdition
It was a little hard for me to believe Tom Hanks as a Mob hit man in the 1930s. I just always see him as a nice guy. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t do a good job, and in the end he really is a lot nicer than anyone around him. He gets caught between an Irish boss, Paul Newman, and his son, Daniel Craig. Newman knows his son is a worthless psycho who is stealing from him, but family is all. ... Read more »
Road to Rio
A bit of a slump in the series here. It’s funny, and has the usual gags and inside jokes and asides, but some of the spirit seems to be missing. There’s a nice guest appearance by the Andrews Sisters, their last time in a movie. And there’s one joke that reminded me of—if you can believe it—Pulp Fiction. All through the picture people are talking about “the ... Read more »
Road to Utopia
This one is not quite as good as Road to Morocco. As always, there are some good jokes, good comic dialogue, and plenty of inside jokes and such. From time to time Robert Benchley shows up in the corner of the frame to comment on the action, but it’s not as funny as it should be. The funniest bit is when Bob Hope is sitting on a snowdrift with Dorothy Lamour. She ... Read more »
Road to Zanzibar
As usual our boys are con men, actually carnival performers whose tricks always go wrong, but this time the girls—Dorothy Lamour, of course, and her friend Una Merkel—are cons, too, running a racket where Dorothy poses as a slave and Una convinces a chump to buy her. They split the money with the slave trader. Since this is “darkest Africa,” you expect a little 1940s racism, but it’s not ... Read more »
The Road Warrior
DIRECTED by George Miller
PRODUCED by Byron Kennedy
WRITTEN by Terry Hayes & George Miller & Brian Hannant
ORIGINAL MUSIC by Brian May
CINEMATOGRAPHY by Dean Semler
ART DIRECTION by Graham ‘Grace’ Walker
The Mad Max series is a perfect illustration of one of the worst things about most films that have a Roman numeral after them, ... Read more »
Rob Roy
There ain’t no justice. Not only was Braveheart not the Best Picture of 1995 (it was a weak year, but Apollo 13, Babe, and Il Postino: The Postman were all better than that overblown Mel Gibson farrago), it wasn’t even the Best Picture About a Scottish Hero of 1995. This movie was, in fact, better than those ... Read more »
Robin and Marian
Robin and Marian (1976) Not your usual Robin Hood story. The writer, James Goldman, assumes you know all that Errol Flynn and his merry men in Sherwood Forest stuff. Here we meet Robin and Little John after they’ve been Crusading for 20 years with Richard the Lionheart, who has become just another Christian butcher. (Not that he was ever much of a king, or a human being.) When the king ... Read more »
Robin Hood
Disney made a lot of feature-length animated masterpieces, some movies that were merely competent, and a few that were not very good. Here we have the absolute nadir, the rock bottom of the long decline that began with The Sword in the Stone and didn’t really end until The Little Mermaid. Absolutely everything ... Read more »
Robin Hood
Somehow I just expected more from Ridley Scott, I guess because I associate him with such wonderful movies as Alien and Thelma and Louise. But then I look over his credits and discover, to my surprise, that the list is full of crap like Gladiator (tied with Braveheart for Worst Best ... Read more »
Robin Hood: Men in Tights
For some reason I thought I had seen this, but upon a recent viewing it seems almost certain that I hadn’t. At least, I didn’t remember any of it. My impression had been that it wasn’t very good (go figure; how could I have an opinion on a movie I never saw?). For what it’s worth, it’s better than I didn’t remember it to be. … or something like that.
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