Movie Reviews
Titles starting with A
Another Fine Mess
Stan Laurel had not quite put the finishing touches on his child-like personality in this two-reeler. The boys, fleeing the police, enter the mansion of one Colonel Wilberforce Buckshot (James Finlayson, master of the “double-take and fade away”) who is off to ... Read more »
Another Woman
Another Bergmanesque effort for Woody, and one of the better ones. Gena Rowlands is a professor who is writing a book, and rents a small apartment (Woody’s characters seldom have money problems) to get away from the construction noise in her own place. She soon discovers that she can hear conversations in the psychiatrist’s office next door through the heating vent. She covers the vent, ... Read more »
Antitrust
Ryan Philippe is a hotshot programmer working with some friends in a garage to change the world with open-source programs. But he is tempted away by Tim Robbins, the billionaire CEO of a company that is seeking to unite all the stuff in the world into one giant program. It doesn’t take him long to find out that Tim’s methods go way beyond corporate espionage and all the way into the murder ... Read more »
Antonia’s Line
Best Foreign Language Film 1995.
This is one of our favorite movies. We watched it again, and it was even better than we remembered. There’s not a lot I can say about it. A woman and her daughter return to the mother’s village in Holland right after the war. There are births, there are a lot of deaths. Bad things happen, good things happen. We continue right into the ... Read more »
Antonio Gaudí
It seems a little ironic to me that this celebration of the works of Antonio Gaudí (1852-1926) should have been shot and directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara. The traditional Japanese esthetic is minimalist to the extreme. Absolutely nothing could be further away from that than the buildings of the great Catalan architect.
After some deliberation I have decided that Frank Lloyd Wright ... Read more »
Antwone Fisher
Fairly routine drama. Denzel Washington has never turned in a bad performance, though I find it ironic that he won his second Oscar for one of his least interesting pictures.
Anything Else
Woody Allen and Jason Biggs are joke writers who form a friendship. Jason is twenty-one and Woody is sixty. (Woody shaved a few points here. Like, eight!) Woody has a lot of what he calls “seminal jokes,” like he did in Annie Hall. One of them concerns a man telling his woes to a taxi driver, wailing about how life is meaningless, unfair, without purpose, and ... Read more »
The Apartment
It’s hard to believe this movie was controversial, but it was. It dealt with adultery and fornication without really disapproving of them. Most critics loved it, but a stupid few dismissed it as a “dirty movie.” My, my, how far we have come. It still holds up pretty well, despite being quite dated by the revolution in mores that got started shortly after it was made. Read more »
Apocalypse Now Redux
There are a lot of directors who like to release “director’s cuts” of their movies, but Francis Ford Coppola is the champ in that regard. He tinkered endlessly with the Godfather movies, and apparently he was never really satisfied with this one. He has added 48 minutes to what was already a pretty long movie. Some of it is little snips and dabs extending certain ... Read more »
Apocalypto
What was Mel Gibson thinking? That if people would pay $611,899,420 to see a film in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin, they might pony up a similar amount for a film in Mayan? He forgot one thing, which was in The Nazz. But most of the other elements were in place, the fixation on violence and torture, in particular. The only thing it was really missing was Mel himself, getting the shit kicked ... Read more »