Whip It

This is Drew Barrymore’s first job as a director. She has a small part, but the star is Ellen Page, who was so good in Juno and Hard Candy. The story concerns a girl in a small Texas town not far from Austin. Her mother is entering her in beauty pageants, which she is totally uninterested in. She discovers the world of roller derby, ... Read more »

Whiplash

There was R. Lee Ermy as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket. There was Alan Rickman as Professor Snape in the Harry Potter movies. There was Coach Eisenman, the five-foot-four toad who made this six-foot-three (then) boy’s life a living hell in P.E. period in the ninth grade. And now we have J.K. Simmons as Terrence Fletcher in Read more »

Whisky Tango Foxtrot

It took me a few moments to understand the title. I mean, I was frowning at it, and thinking “What The Fu- … Oh. I get it. Clever.” If you still need a clue, think of the military alphabetic code: Able, Baker, Charlie, Delta …”

This is a mostly amusing story, as you would expect from the wonderful Tina Fey, based (broadly, I assume) on the experiences of Kim Barker, a largely ... Read more »

The Whisperers

Edith Evans got the “Dame” added to her name for her extensive work in the legitimate theater, but she did some movies and was swell in all the ones I have seen. She was good enough for an Oscar nomination for this one, made when she was 79. She would continue working for 15 more films, until her death in 1976.

Here she is an elderly woman living alone in a squalid two-room flat in ... Read more »

The Whisperers

Edith Evans got the “Dame” added to her name for her extensive work in the legitimate theater, but she did some movies and was swell in all the ones I have seen. She was good enough for an Oscar nomination for this one, made when she was 79. She would continue working for 15 more films, until her death in 1976.

Here she is an elderly woman living alone in a squalid two-room flat in ... Read more »

The Whistleblower

Sometimes a movie can make me so angry I just want to shout to the heavens, enough! This is one. It’s the true story (compressed and rearranged for dramatic purposes, as all these things are) of Kathryn Bolkovac, a cop from the Midwest who took a job policing for the UN in Bosnia after the wars. But she didn’t actually work for the UN, she worked for one of those “independent contractors,” ... Read more »

White Chicks

This was #2 at the drive-in with Spiderman 2. Thank god it wasn’t first. You don’t expect wit from a movie like this, you can tell that from the trailers. So can’t they at least make the low-brow humor funny? Two things are guaranteed to make Lee laugh: pratfalls, and fart jokes. (Okay, fart jokes get me, too.) In the first ten minutes they passed up golden ... Read more »

White God

Every once in a while a movie comes along that totally blindsides me. You think you are going to see one thing, and it turns out to be something entirely different. Here’s how it starts out:

Lili (Zsófia Psotta) is a twelve-year-old girl living in Budapest, who has a beloved mutt named Hagen. Her mother is off to Australia for a few months, and she has to stay with her father, who ... Read more »

White Heat

Everybody remembers Cagney’s masterly performance. “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” He was a gangster, which was familiar, but in earlier pics like this there was a sub-text of admiration, of the lone cowboy who doesn’t play by society’s rules but has some of his own. Not here. He is a psychopath with a very sick mother complex, plain and simple, there is ... Read more »

The White Helmets

I have not seen any of the other four nominees for Best Documentary Short Subject for this year, but I would be amazed if any of them were better than this, the winner. Producer Joanna Natasegara and director Orlando von Einsiedel went to Syria, to Aleppo, to the very heart of darkness, to film the work of the Syria Civil Defence, a group of about 3000 volunteers known for wearing white ... Read more »