Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Anne With and E

(Canada)

I, of course, have never read the book, it being a girls’ book, but I think I missed a good one. The story is of an older brother and sister living together who decide to take in an orphan boy to help with the chores on their Prince Edward Island farm. Through a mix-up, Anne is delivered instead. Naturally they send her back, but they weren’t counting on the ... Read more »

The Picture of Dorian Gray

(1945)

The IMDb lists five versions of this, including one just last year, 2018, and a sixth in development, where they plan to do the old gender switcheroo, making Gray a woman. None of the others seem to amount to anything, but I thought this one was a doozy. Gray is played by the devilishly handsome Hurd Hatfield, and devilish is the key word. There is just something in that face that tells me ... Read more »

Great Expectations

(1998)

If I had to pick a favorite Dickens novel it would probably be David Copperfield, but this one is a close second. And I don’t really see the need to create a modern-day version of it when we have a perfect example already in David Lean’s 1946 version, starring John Mills and a very young Alec Guinness. I don’t mind too much that they excised several plot ... Read more »

Equalizer 2

(2018)

I’m always a little embarrassed to review a film like this, which I have to call a guilty pleasure. I guess it began way back with Death Wish, a “super-violent” film that looks pretty tame and quaint these days. People like to deplore these films, and they will get no argument from me. They are dreadful, ugly, blood-soaked exercises in vigilante violence. And, in ... Read more »

The Highwaymen

(2019)

I really, really loved the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, but I didn’t believe a minute of it. It was pure fiction, from beginning to end. These were not nice people, there was no romance about them. This movie sets the record straight and shows them for the despicable scum thugs they were. America idolized them, and it’s hard for me to understand why. Desperate for ... Read more »

The Mountain Between Us

(2017)

This is an okay, if pretty unlikely, story of survival. A small plane crashes high up in the mountains when the pilot suffers a fatal heart attack. The passengers, Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, survive, but he is badly hurt. A dog survives, too, and will be important in their later ordeals. They have to make their way down the mountain. It ain’t easy. This was okay until they tacked on a ... Read more »

Winchester

(2018)

When I lived in the Haight-Ashbury, oh these many years ago, we used to load the family into the old rustbucket and drive down the peninsula to one of half a dozen drive-in movies. Alas, all gone, all gone. It was always a double feature, and in the intermission in addition to the admonitions from dancing popcorn boxes and bubbling cups of Coke to “Let’s all go to the lobby!” there were ... Read more »

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

(2017)

Even by the somewhat iffy standards of comic book art in the 1940s and into the ‘50s, I recall that Wonder Woman was easily the worst-drawn comic I ever looked at. The eagle on her breastplate was all mushy. Scenes of her arrival in her “invisible” airplane at the Amazon Island, whatever the hell it was called, were sometimes so incompetent that I just had to laugh. The Wonder Woman you ... Read more »

Ready Player One

(2018)

It’s possible that deeply addicted computer game players will find this gigantic mess fun. I recognized some of the figures from games of the past. But it’s basically just Fast and Furious in cyberspace, and it was so boring and pointless we stopped watching after about thirty minutes. I mean, if this stupid chase with nothing at stake was how it started out, it ... Read more »

Au revoir, les enfants

(France/West Germany, 1987)

Louis Malle was one of the greats, and he made films in both French and English. This one is autobiographical, and recounts his time in a Catholic school in occupied France, when he was eleven. The priest (one of the good ones) is sheltering three Jewish boys under assumed names. The protagonist, Julien, figures this out, and eventually they become friends. But the Gestapo arrives and ... Read more »