Movie Reviews
Titles starting with B
The Bletchly Circle (Second season)
Once more we join the bored-to-tears female geniuses from Bletchley Park as they set out to solve mysteries. This is such an appealing group, and as you watch them you can’t help lament the sheer waste of talent for the thousands of years before the women’s liberation movement suddenly opened up almost infinite career paths for women. In 1953, though, it was ... Read more »
Blind Horizon
I kept wondering how and why a film like this got made. Terrific cast, looks good, keeps you wondering for almost an hour … then falls apart into tripe and foolishness. The answer is it was funded by a New Mexico film program that Val Kilmer is involved in, so when he signed on the money was there. But it was shown only at a film festival in the US, and then went direct to DVD. Don’t ... Read more »
The Blind Side
My feeling is, a movie like this either works for you, or it doesn’t. With me, much depends on the performances, and this one was sold to me, big-time, by Sandra Bullock. Lordamighty, that girl has chosen some real bad shit since her knockout debut in Speed, including the very recent All About Steve, which achieved a 17 rating at ... Read more »
The Bling Ring
It’s an incredible but true story. This group of mostly girls broke into the homes of celebrities and robbed them blind. Not only that, but with some of them they did it again, and again, and again. What? Nobody had any private security to come with an armed response, like all those signs you see in the Hollywood Hills? Apparently not. Some of them, like Paris Hilton, had such an ... Read more »
Blitz Wolf
Warner Brothers saw fit to run a disclaimer before this little cartoon, explaining that the racial stereotypes contained herein “… were wrong then, and they are wrong now.” No argument from me, but I was expecting yellow, buck-toothed, narrow-headed, grinning, myopic “Japs,” and this is just about the Nazis. Frankly, I didn’t see any racial stereotyping of Germans. Were the Nazis ... Read more »
The Blob
I would have been eleven. It was a Saturday matinee in the little bijou Neches Theater in Port Neches, Texas, and as usual there were about eight animated cartoons, a few installments of some crappy serial (possibly even Commando Cody in Radar Men From the Moon, starring my future friend, Peter Brocco!). Screaming kids throwing popcorn, spilling Cokes, running in ... Read more »
Blockheads
Like most people of my generation, I grew up with B-western cowboy heroes like Ken Maynard and Hoot Gibson and Bob Steele, and comedies from the Little Rascals and Laurel and Hardy on the black and white TV. I think it was because they were out of copyright, in the public domain, and so the stations could fill their after-school hours until the local news with stuff they didn’t have to ... Read more »
Blood Diamond
This movie suffers from not being able to decide what it wants to be. It effectively exposes the terrible human cost of that rock on your finger, showing how diamonds prop up the sort of “revolutionaries” that are the only thing on Earth worse than the governments they plan to overthrow. But it is so overloaded with the sort of wildly overdone action scenes that we could accept ... Read more »
Blood Father
I understand why Mel Gibson was attracted to this script. Mel has a Jesus complex, and likes any movie where he can be shown to suffer, and he suffers plenty here. Why anyone else would like it is a puzzle to me. In the opening scenes Mel’s junkie, drunken daughter, who has gotten herself involved with some serious drug dealers, is there when a mass murder happens, and in fact shoots one ... Read more »
Blood Simple
Citizen Kane aside, I can’t think of a more assured, confident, groundbreaking first film than this one. I mean, it had me from the opening frames and never let me go. I can almost hear M. Emmett Walsh (who got a big career boost from this movie), speaking over the shot of the bleak Texas plains:
The world is full o’ complainers. An’ the fact ... Read more »