Movie Reviews
Titles starting with A
Assassination of a High School President
Aspires to be a sort of black comedy noir combination of Chinatown, All the President’s Men, and Heathers, but doesn’t make it. Everybody looks way too old for high school. Maybe if ... Read more »
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
I wish I could remember why I rented this one. I don’t like Brad Pitt—though he’s been good now and then—and I’m sick to death of stories about the superstars of the Old West. Many of them have been portrayed over and over as heroes, but most were scumbags. I speak not only of the entire scumbag Read more »
The Assassination of Richard Nixon
I wonder if Sam Byck might be better known to Stephen Sondheim‘s music than to historians. Byck plays a role in Sondheim’s Assassins, along with other wannabes like Read more »
Assassination Tango
Robert Duvall likes to act, and he likes to dance the tango. Every once in a while he likes to direct, too, and not surprisingly, actors and acting are the most important elements in his films. In this one he tries to combine the acting part and the tango, with mixed results. It’s really two ... Read more »
Astro Boy
Sometimes going to a movie with very low expectations is the very thing you need to enjoy it. My expectations for this one were below zero. I have no interest in Japanese anime, and no knowledge of the hero other than he looks pretty stupid. If you dressed him in red-and-white-checkered dungarees he’d look a lot like Bob’s Big Boy. Not a promising beginning. And the story isn’t much, ... Read more »
The Astronaut Farmer
How can a movie go wrong in so many ways? It’s about a man building his own spaceship and taking off into the unknown. There must be a good story in there—I ought to know, I wrote one. But this ain’t it. I’d usually insert a spoiler warning here, since I’m going to give it all away, but I’ll just give a ... Read more »
At Long Last Love
One of the very few movies that, as far as I can tell, has never been released on VHS, much less DVD. I suppose that’s because the director, Peter Bogdanovich, actually apologized for it in an open letter published in many newspapers. I first saw it when HBO was a baby. I don’t recall much about it. Now ... Read more »
L’Atalante
This movie is on many critics’ best of all time lists. I’d never seen it before. It is visually stunning, and obviously miles ahead of the sort of thing Hollywood was doing at the time. It happens mostly aboard a river barge with a newlywed couple and a crusty old first mate. It combines surrealism and impressionism, reminds me of Read more »
Atlantic City
This is an excellent movie in almost any way you look at it, but it has one glaring weakness. Burt Lancaster plays a two-bit numbers runner, a man who has been a loser, a small-time hood all his life. Then, pretty much by accident, he comes into a large quantity of cocaine. Suddenly he’s in the chips, and he blossoms, dressing well and getting into a friendship with the great Susan ... Read more »