Steamboat Bill, Jr.

I was looking through recommendations at Netflix and happened on a Buster Keaton title. I clicked on it, and noticed the user rating was a staggering 5.0 out of 5. They direct you to other films and they had eight of them, the lowest rating being a 4.1. This is very high for Netflix, especially for films made 80 or more years ago. It reminded me of just how good ... Read more »

Stealth

When I saw in the New Times that the double feature at the Sunset was what were, by all accounts, the two dumbest movies of the summer, and maybe of all time, I briefly considered going anyway. But then I remembered what my granddaddy used to say when some unpleasant course of action was suggested: “Let’s don’t and say we did.” He’s right. Some movies are so, so ... Read more »

Stealing Sinatra

“In 1963 an event took place that shook the world … This isn’t it.”

This movie is “based on fact.” That is, the events took place. Frank Sinatra Jr. really was kidnapped a few months after JFK was assassinated, and it happened pretty much as it is shown here. Three guys … well, Lee said something like, if you added up all their IQs and expressed it as a temperature, ... Read more »

The Station Agent

We loved this little movie. It’s little in every respect: it is low-budget, there is no violence or overstated emotions, and the main character, Fin, is 4’6″. He is a train freak, and he inherits a small abandoned train station in New Jersey and decides to live there. He is very withdrawn, sick and tired of being a circus attraction everywhere he goes, he just wants to be alone. But ... Read more »

The Statement

A rather surprisingly bad muddle from Norman Jewison, a very good director. It concerns a Frenchman, Michael Caine, who was a Vichy policeman and ordered the killing of 5 Jews in 1944. He’s an old man now, having been protected by French police and right-wing Catholics. But it never amounts to anything. Caine is good, as usual, but the rest of the great cast isn’t given much to do. I ... Read more »

State of Play

Here’s an oddity. This is a pretty damn good movie … and I’m going to recommend that you not see it. It is a 2-hour remake of a 6-hour British television miniseries, and the original is so very, very much better than the copy that it would be a crime to see this one and not the other. And, of course, if you did see this one, it would spoil the myriad surprises in the original.

I ... Read more »

State of Play

(This is not the 2009 remake with the same title, starring Russell Crowe.) I am tongue-tied, I literally can’t find enough good things to say. How about this: What Lonesome Dove was to westerns, what Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was to espionage, this 6-hour BBC mini-series is to newspaper movies. Think Read more »

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

Gosh. Wow. Gee whillikers. And that’s about it.

But I guess I can’t just leave it at that. They’re saying this is the best of the series since The Empire Strikes Back, and they’re right … but then I realize I didn’t really like Empire that much. Star Wars, the original, was one of the most ... Read more »

Star!

In the late 1960s 20th Century Fox wanted to repeat the smash box-office performance of The Sound of Music, so they made three huge musicals, just in time to perfectly coincide with the death of movie musicals: Hello, Dolly!, Dr. Dolittle, and this one. All of them lost money to one degree or another, and this ... Read more »

Stage Beauty

This entertaining, thoughtful, well-acted, well-written, good looking movie suffers from one unfortunate thing: It deals with the same theme as one of my favorite movies of all time, Shakespeare in Love. The older movie was set in Elizabethan England and this one is later, during the Restoration. In both instances women were not allowed on stage. Men played the ... Read more »