Movie Reviews
Woman Walks Ahead
Caroline Weldon was an artist who, in 1889, traveled to the Dakota Territory with the intention of painting portraits of the Lakota people and working for Indian rights. As usual, the government was in the process of fucking the red man once more by taking most of the reservation to give to white settlers. She became friends with Sitting Bull. You know it will end badly.
I don’t ... Read more »
Unsane
Stephen Soderbergh is a director whose films have been all over the map. He “arrived” with the small indie sex, lies, and videotape, which won the Palm d’Or at Cannes. He followed it up with the box office bomb, Kafka. He followed that with five other experimental bombs, and then suddenly here’s Out of Sight, ... Read more »
Big Little Lies
An HBO series created by David E. Kelley with a fantastic cast. Listen to this: Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Alexander Skarsgård, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep. It follows a group of very rich mothers in Monterrey, California, jockeying to attain the very best stuff for their offspring. Think Felicity Huffman buying a good SAT score for her child. These women would do ... Read more »
Searching
Though it’s hard to believe it can be done, this entire movie unfolds on computer and phone screens. And it’s fascinating! I am not very tech savvy. For instance, I’ve never logged on to Facebook, have no idea how to tweet, don’t understand what a hashtag is. I’ve never even sent a text message, if you can believe that. But it was all perfectly understandable to even such as me. ... Read more »
A Little Princess
This is the second film by Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, who doesn’t make a lot of films, but when he does, they are worth noting. His last three were Children of Men in 2006, Gravity in 2013, and Roma in 2018. What a trio, huh? He’s won five Oscars.
It’s sweet little story ... Read more »
Laura
Beautiful female movie stars were so thick on the ground in Hollywood in the 1940s that you couldn’t turn around without tripping over one. But was there ever one as beautiful as Gene Tierney? It’s a matter of endless debate, of course, and there are dozens of candidates for “Most Beautiful,” but she would be hard to beat. If you like film noir (and I love it) this is one of the absolute ... Read more »
Number One Fan
The title translates as “She Loves It.” We have been lucky lately in stumbling across several small movies that surprised me. Surprise is such a rare thing in movies these days that I treasure them like a miser. This is one. Sandrine Kinberlain plays Muriel, a superfan, someone who pretty much devotes her life to obsessing over a super-pop singer, Vincent LaCroix, played by Laurent ... Read more »
Mortal Engines
“Steampunk” is a genre within the science fiction genre that I’ve never really understood. These stories take place in alternate universes where the tech has not advanced beyond the Jules Verne stage, and yet they seem to involve massive, sometimes gargantuan, machines. Rivets, brass, bolts, steam hissing out of everything … these are all visual things, hard to sell in a written story. ... Read more »
Cold Pursuit
It is a pleasure to find a movie I knew nothing about, and find it’s one of the best films I’ve seen all year. This is Liam Neeson again, a guy who has become a hell of an action hero in his 60s. But this isn’t really one of those. Here, he’s a fairly ordinary dude who drives a snowplow in a part of Colorado where it can drift ten feet high. His son dies of a heroin overdose. His wife ... Read more »
The Red Balloon
I hate the phrase “instant classic,” but if there ever was such a thing, this little 35-minute film is it. Right from the very first, everyone with any sense could see that this was one for the ages, a film that would appeal just as much in 2019 (and probably 2119, if we live that long) as it did in 1956. It was the only short film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, even ... Read more »