Movie Reviews
Titles starting with C
The Client
Wouldn’t this be cool: At the time this was made, John Grisham had it in his contract that he could veto any casting choice. This was only his fourth novel, and already he had that sort of clout. He exercised it by insisting that no child actor be cast in the central role of Mark Sway, the young man who witnesses the suicide of a Mob lawyer and learns, literally, where the body is buried. ... Read more »
Clockwise
Michael Frayn wrote Noises Off, what I consider to be the funniest stage play ever written, outside of possibly the works of Oscar Wilde. At least, it is the funniest one I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen it twice, and nearly hurt myself both times. (Unfortunately, the 1992 Peter Bogdanovich film was not nearly so funny, though it had its moments.) He is the master ... Read more »
A Clockwork Orange
These days, just about everybody makes “science fiction” movies, if you want to call total crap like Transformers and The Green Lantern science fiction. But there are a few who specialize in it, and some of them are pretty good. Ridley Scott and James Cameron come to mind. But before Scott and Cameron there was Kubrick, and he ... Read more »
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
I was really interested to see how much, if any, of the feeling of awe I had when first seeing this movie would hold up, almost forty years later. The answer, sad to say, is not much. In fact much of it looks plain silly, and I couldn’t help noticing a lot of things that I just didn’t worry about too much the first time in the manic sweep of Spielbergian technique. This time, the technique ... Read more »
Close Your Eyes
Also known as Doctor Sleep. Gets off to a good start, but becomes a bit hard to believe toward the end. It’s really, really tough to make a really creepy movie, one that works for me beginning to end. There was some good stuff here, but not enough to recommend it.
Closely Watched Trains
This is one of the first foreign movies I saw when I arrived at Michigan State from the redneck regions of Deepest Texas, and it’s a doozy.
Young Miloš Hrma begins his first day on the job at the sleepy little railroad station. He only wants to do as his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father have done before him: Get through life with the least possibly effort. World War II is ... Read more »
Closer
With some people, the worst thing they can ask is “Tell me the truth,” and the worst thing they can say is “I love you.” They don’t want the truth, and they don’t have the foggiest notion of love, except of self, and are concerned only with possession. This movie is a very cynical view of human beings that, I’m sorry to say, is all too often accurate. It reminds me very much of Mike ... Read more »
The Closet
A delightful little soufflé of a French farce, that knows how to add comic complications and when to get off the stage. It’s only 84 minutes long, which is about right for something like this. Daniel Auteuil is Pignon, a nebbishy, boring office worker who is about to get fired because, basically, he’s dull. A cipher. His new neighbor is a retired industrial psychologist and knows a great ... Read more »
Cloud Atlas
Cloud Atlas (2012)
1849, Pacific Ocean. A businessman dealing in slaves is being slowly poisoned by the ship’s doctor.
1936, Cambridge, England and Edinburgh, Scotland. A young homosexual composer moves in with an elderly composer to help him out.
1973, San Francisco. A girl reporter works to expose a sinister plot by Big Oil, involving a nuclear ... Read more »
Cloverfield
What an odd little movie. We had been warned that sitting close has actually caused cases of vertigo, due to it being filmed entirely with hand-held cameras. It’s a point-of-view movie, but it’s not The Lady in the Lake. I didn’t figure that, being at the drive-in, this would be a problem, and it wasn’t. The problem was that it was too dark for outdoor viewing. ... Read more »