Movie Reviews
Titles starting with A
Apollo 13
Other than actual astronauts and the pilots and crew of NASA’s famous Vomit Comet, very few Earthlings have experienced more time in weightlessness than Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Ron Howard, and the camera operators and other crew who filmed this movie. There are many ways to fake showing people in zero gee in a movie—such as in Gravity, where no ... Read more »
Arabesque
I saw this when it was new with my great good friend Calvin Stanley. Not very far into it we began to notice something. In every shot where he could possibly justify it—and in many where he had to reach way into his cinematographer’s bag of tricks—director Stanley Donen would frame things so that we would see things ... Read more »
Arbitrage
Gee whiz, what kind of country is it where a businessman can’t “borrow” 418 million dollars from one of his companies (off the books, of course) and use it to temporarily plug a huge hole in another of his companies caused by a bad investment in Russian copper mines? It’s my money, isn’t it? (Well, not actually, it belongs to the stockholders, but when you handle ... Read more »
L’Argent
The title means “money.” The story starts out interesting enough, adapted from a work by Tolstoy. Some kids pass a counterfeit banknote, and after a while an innocent man is charged with a crime because of it. He loses his job, gets involved in a bank robbery, goes to jail … and ends up as a mass murderer. So … what? Money ... Read more »
L’Argent de poche
The IMDb lists the English translation as Small Change, but the title on the DVD was Pocket Money, which looks, to my extremely small knowledge of French, to be the more literal translation. This movie didn’t quite work for me. It has no plot—not a problem in itself—but it didn’t deeply involve me in the lives of the characters, ... Read more »
Argo
First of all, I really liked this movie. It’s all a movie should be: frightening, funny, well-written and well-acted, skin-of-your-teeth excitement, even though you know how it all comes out. This is so, so hard. The best ever at this tough dramatic challenge was the original The Day of the Jackal, but this one ... Read more »
The AristoCats
Possibly the worst of the Disney animated features. I’ll have to see Robin Hood to be sure, something I’m not really looking forward to. Plot: A rich old bitch makes her will leaving all her money to her four cats, a mama and her three annoying kittens. After the cats are dead, the money would go to her butler, Edgar. Now imagine Edgar, overhearing this, doing ... Read more »
The Aristocrats
Hold on! Stop! You’re about to make a terrible mistake! The DVD you’re holding isn’t the 1970 Disney feature-length cartoon, The Aristocats. That one is full of talking animals. This one is full of … well, shit, plus every horribly ugly thing you have ever imagined in your darkest moment, and ... Read more »
Arlington Road
There’s a bomb that’s about to go off under the FBI building in D.C., and Jeff Bridges is in a race to stop it. We’re all familiar with the scenario, and the last-second arrival of the hero and subsequent prevention of a huge disaster. But this one is a little different. I can’t say more without a spoiler warning, and I don’t really think it’s worth it. This is an extremely paranoid and ... Read more »