The Lookout

This is a little gem, not quite on the order of Red Rock West, Fargo, or A Simple Plan, but very good nonetheless. High school hockey star is driving like an idiot with three friends, crashes the car, killing the friends and leaving himself brain damaged. He’s not stupid, but has ... Read more »

Looper

There’s a problem inherent in all time travel stories, and it’s quite simple to state: They’re impossible. You may have heard of the grandfather paradox, which is that you invent a time machine, go back in time, kill your grandfather or do something that causes him to die, in which case you were never born, never built the time machine, never killed your grandfather. Everything’s okay ... Read more »

The Lorax

The Lorax (2012) Sometimes, as with movies like Mary Poppins, it’s better if you don’t know the source material. I was able to enjoy that movie unreservedly because I’d never read the book. Likewise, though I have been madly in love with Dr. Seuss since I read the books like McElligot’s Pool and If I Ran the ... Read more »

Lord Love a Duck

So Roddy McDowall is this 38-year-old high school student at a soulless new school run by a wildly overacting Harvey Corman … George Axelrod obviously had been watching films from “Mods and Rockers” London in the Swingin’ ‘60s, in particular two films by Richard Lester: A Hard Day’s Night and The Knack … and How to Get It. He attempts ... Read more »

The Lost City of Z

An Amazon production. Remember, when you pronounce this, to say zed, as the British do, not zee.

For the whole of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, adventurers and explorers (it was often hard to decide which was which) were obsessed with filling in all those blank spots on the map. The biggest ones were in Africa, or in South America, ... Read more »

Lost Highway

What are you going to do about a guy like David Lynch? He went right from Eraserhead, one of the only independent “underground” films I thought was really brilliant, right to the big-studio and equally brilliant The Elephant Man, produced by Mel Brooks, of all people. Then he made the disastrously awful and expensive Read more »

Lost in La Mancha

A heartbreaker, all about the best movie you ever didn’t see because it didn’t get made, and why it didn’t get made. Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote would have been at least fabulously interesting visually, to judge from the pre-production we see. A basic course on all that can go wrong in the production of a movie. And you thought Read more »

Lost in Space

Sometimes it’s a good idea to remake a classic with new technology. Sometimes it’s not. This time it is not. I think I watched maybe an episode and a half of the original series, saw that it was silly, not funny, and that was that. Just those horrible costumes would have likely been enough. I guess what everybody remembers, even someone who never watched it, like me, is the line the robot ... Read more »

Lost in Translation

Great performances, intelligent script, fascinating settings. Why didn’t I like it more? Richard Roeper said people have actually come up to him, angry that he recommended it. There’s a theory going around that if you saw it in a theater you were likely to love it; if you saw it on DVD, you didn’t. We saw the DVD. [I liked it.] So did I; just not as much as I expected to.

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra

This is a loving recreation of those gawdawful B&W monster movies from the ‘50s by Ed Wood and other hacks. It is very well done, some real howlers in the script, but it’s caught in a strange irony. They duplicate everything, including the deadening pace. It works for about 45 minutes. Unfortunately, it’s 90 minutes long. If you really love those old movies you might have fun. I don’t ... Read more »