Movie Reviews
Selma
When I think of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., I’m always a bit sad. I mean, he was far from the first basically good man, and far from the first one in the public eye, who let his cock get the better of him. It’s a powerful impulse, sex, and has led to a great deal of human folly. (On my part, too; I have sometimes been no better than I should be.) But it strikes me that seldom ... Read more »
Mr. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner was probably the second-best English painter ever. (The best, he said modestly, was that amazing genius John Varley, 1778-1842.) (I was going to let that little joke stand, but then I looked up Mr. Varley on Wiki. I knew he was a competent painter of landscapes, but I hadn’t realized that his life was almost exactly contemporary with JMW Turner: 1775 to 1851. ... Read more »
Unbroken
The real Louis Zamperini died a few months before this was released. I don’t know if he ever saw a preview. I hope so. It is a remarkable life story. After finishing eighth in the 5000-meters at Hitler’s Olympics in 1936, he became a bombardier in a B-24 in the Pacific. His first plane was shot up, and the second one was in terrible shape, so bad that it basically came apart in the air ... Read more »
In a World …
I was looking forward to this one. It was written by, directed by, and stars a woman named Lake Bell. I admire that sort of determination to get your film made. And it’s not a bad one. It concerns the esoteric world of voice-over recording for movie trailers. You know the kind: A deep-voiced and somehow menacing and/or ominous man opens the thing (after a thudding bass note or two) saying ... Read more »
An Act of Murder
One of those stories where everyone involved is acting from the best of intentions, but everything could have come out much better if they had only spoken to each other. But that may be the point of the whole thing.
It’s a movie very much of its time. Frederick March is a respected judge who has been happily married for twenty years. But his wife is getting crippling headaches. ... Read more »
Flyboys
One of the greatest aviation movies of all time was Wings, in 1927. Another was Hell’s Angels, in 1930. There have been a few other movies about flying in the Great War, but not lately. I love movies about planes and flying, but there is something special about these men who went up in those fragile old kites and shot at each other. ... Read more »
Wild
Reese Witherspoon is very good here as a woman who has messed up her life badly, and as a means to “find herself,” goes looking along the Pacific Crest Trail. This is a path of misery, sweat, tears, blisters, and all manner of other discomfort that stretches from Mexico to Canada through some of the most dangerous terrain in North America. She doesn’t actually walk the whole thing, but ... Read more »
A Most Violent Year
This is a nice little movie, but I have to make an objection right up front. I think the title is wildly inappropriate. Maybe it’s just me, I’ll admit that, but with a title like that it ought to be just a little bit violent, is that too much to ask? Okay, maybe that was the whole idea, to sucker us into waiting and waiting an waiting for the violent stuff to happen.
I guess it’s a ... Read more »
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
At the end of my review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug I made two observations: That I would see the third and final movie, and that I was not looking forward to it. So I’ve fulfilled my promise now, and I enjoyed it about as much as I expected to, which is not very much.
The title should have clued me in, but somehow I didn’t expect Read more »
Woman in Gold
We feel a special connection with this movie. It involves the legal fight to return five Gustav Klimpt paintings to the woman whose family they were stolen from by the fucking Nazis. For fifty years they were in the possession of a long-time receiver of stolen goods, namely the government of Austria. It’s no secret that, after a long and nasty legal fight (by the Austrians), they were ... Read more »