Movie Reviews
Titles starting with I
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
This is humor just about as black a humor gets. In fact, I’m sure a lot of people would not see it as being funny at all, and I couldn’t really blame them. We see a man, played by Gian Maria Volontè arrive at the apartment of a beautiful woman, Florinda Bolkan, and she asks “How are you going to kill me today?” Looks like a kinky sex game. Then he slices her throat with a razor blade. He ... Read more »
Invictus
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, and in the end he forced the government to let him loose. Most people—myself included—would have been pretty pissed off when they got out. They’d be looking for revenge. Not Mandela. Most people—myself included—figured South Africa would soon descend into race war as the blacks got even for the atrocities committed against them during apartheid. But ... Read more »
The Invisible Man
What I hadn’t remembered about this classic by the great James Whale is how funny it is. Claude Rains (whose face is not seen until the last 30 seconds or so) is really a cut-up, until he starts derailing trains and killing hundreds of people. The special effects must have been startling at the time, and actually, they’re still pretty effective, though the raggedness of film processes in ... Read more »
The Invisible Man
First, it has nothing at all to do with the H.G. Wells story or the Claude Rains 1933 classic movie other than it is about a man who can become invisible. Rather than some secret formula that drives him mad, he has a suit that re-directs light around his body, so he doesn’t need to run around naked in the snow. He is already mad, in the sense that he is a psychopath. He uses this suit to ... Read more »
The Invisible Woman
It’s not an SF film, but a period piece that features Ralph Fiennes as Charles Dickens at the height of his fame, when he could fill a large hall with people who came to hear him read, and Felicity Jones as 18-year-old Nelly Ternan, the youngest of an acting family headed by Kristin Scott Thomas. Nelly is not very good. But she attracts the eye of Dickens, whose marriage is no longer ... Read more »
Invitation to the Dance
I’m guessing Gene Kelly was really hot after An American in Paris in 1951 and Singin’ in the Rain in ’52. Because he brought them his pet project. An all-dance movie. Three separate stories. No dialogue. True ballet. Kelly would direct and choreograph it. I can almost see the frozen smiles on the faces of the studio execs at MGM. But ... Read more »
The Ipcress File
Harry Palmer is sort of the anti-Bond of spy movies. Harry is a regular bloke who wouldn’t be in the game at all except for criminal charges that could be brought against him if he refuses. We see him doing the sort of thing that Bond, James Bond, would never do, like make coffee in the morning, shop for groceries, and feed parking meters. He’s almost blind without his glasses. He can ... Read more »
Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers
The title says it all. There are over 100,000 employees of private contractors in Iraq, handling everything from providing clean water to the troops (most of it is filthy) to trundling convoys of empty trucks back and forth because you get paid whether you deliver a cargo or not, to burning $100,000 trucks because they have flat tires, to the odd spot of torture at health spas like Abu ... Read more »
Iris
I’ve never read anything by Iris Murdoch. Maybe I should. She sounds like she was a fascinating person. Here she is portrayed by Kate Winslet as a young woman, just starting out as a writer, and by Judi Dench as a woman rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer’s. Both of them are great in the roles. Then there is Jim Broadbent, who won the Supporting Actor Oscar for playing her husband, John ... Read more »
The Iron Lady
Critical opinions seemed pretty uniform: Meryl Streep’s performance was awesome, but the film wasn’t very good. I agree with the first part, but not so much with the second. I felt it got rather weaker toward the end, and I question the strategy of trying to tell pretty much the whole life story of a famous person, rather than focus on one defining incident, but that seems to be the way ... Read more »