Movie Reviews
Titles starting with R
Room 237
Here’s an odd little movie. Too odd for me, actually. It’s a study of Stanley Kubrick’s controversial love-it-or-hate-it movie The Shining, and I can’t quite decide why it was made. It is in nine sections, wherein people discuss the movie and their personal reactions to it. We never see these people and they aren’t famous, and must have been selected with only ... Read more »
The Roosevelts: An Intimate History
And the Ken Burns entry for 2014 … gives us fourteen hours over nine episodes, all about the lives of what I think is the most influential family in American history. The complex relationships between the Oyster Bay Roosevelts (Teddy and clan) and the Hyde Park branch (FDR and, by marriage, Eleanor) is explored in depth. We get to know these powerful individuals as people.
I ... Read more »
Rope
Some years later, even Hitchcock admitted that this movie was a stunt. And it is, but it’s an interesting one. The whole film was shot in just ten long takes, and an attempt is made to disguise most of the cuts. It was a practical matter. That’s as much film as could be loaded into a camera of the day. And it posed all sorts of problems. Walls and prop furniture had to be on rollers so the ... Read more »
Rosalie
Sometimes in a musical you get it all. Good story, good acting, terrific music, wonderful dancing. This has happened more often lately than in the early days: West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, The Phantom of the Opera. But it’s happened before, too: Singin’ in the Rain, An American in Paris. More often—and the earlier the movie, the more ... Read more »
Rosemary’s Baby
Roman Polanski has made a lot of good movies, a dud or two, and two masterpieces. This is one of them. (Chinatown is the other, if you were wondering.) It is a movie that simply could not be improved on. I was lucky enough not to have read the book—and it might be a fine book, I still haven’t read it, but the luck part is that I didn’t know if Rosemary was going ... Read more »
Rosenstrasse
Making a tearjerker with the Holocaust as the background ought to be as easy as making a comedy in a banana cream pie factory. So why aren’t I crying?
For one thing, it’s too long. Needlessly long, with lingering shots that could have been cut by half. For another, it can’t decide which story it wants to tell. It keeps jumping back and forth between present day and the past, and ... Read more »
Rosewater
In 2009 an Iranian-Canadian Newsweek reporter named Maziar Bahari appeared in a spoof segment of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” pretending to be interviewed by a “spy.” What he didn’t count on was the motherfucking degenerate Iranian Islamic State’s total lack of a sense of humor. He was picked up and imprisoned for six months, physically beaten and mentally ... Read more »
The Rover
It’s “Ten years after the collapse.” The nature of the collapse is never specified. It might be economic. Whatever it is, it hasn’t altered life in the Australian outback all that much. It’s still hot and dry and dusty and flat and just a totally miserable place to live. Traveling across South Australia on the train from Sydney to Perth, I wondered almost constantly, how do people live out ... Read more »
Roxie Hart
First there was the play, Chicago, written in 1926 by Maureen Dallas Watkins, who based it on her experiences as a reporter. It was made into a silent film in 1927. I would really like to see that. It is two hours long, and the play is dialogue heavy. It was a real challenge to adapt plays like that to silent movies.
Then it was adapted into this film for ... Read more »
A Royal Affair
We know from the first frames that this is a love story that will end tragically. The woman narrating is the involuntary Queen of Denmark, trapped in an arranged marriage with the King, a total asswipe. She’s English, and her life seems hopeless … until you compare it with the lives of the people living in the flowing open sewers and giant rats that make up the rest of Copenhagen, the part ... Read more »