Movie Reviews
Richard III
I don’t know how many Shakespeare plays Laurence Olivier appeared in on the boards, but on film he has played all the biggies: Lear, Shylock, Othello, Hamlet. I’ve seen them all, and to me this is his crowning achievement. He had me utterly spellbound from his first opening soliloquy, and kept me right through to the end. Not only is it superbly acted, with supporting players like Ralph ... Read more »
Rhapsody in Blue
Ask me who the best composers of the 20th Century were, and I’d say this: Ravel, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bernstein, Copland, and Gershwin. Ask me who the best one was, and I’m sorry Maurice, Igor, Sergei, Lennie, and Aaron, but it’s George all the way.
This movie was a lot better than I thought it would be. Biopics are usually a mess, and wildly ... Read more »
Peter Pan
I will always love the Disney animated version, as it is the very first movie I remember seeing. But in retrospect, it’s a few pints of pixiedust short of a great movie. This one is much better. It is wonderful to look at, and has much more of a dark side. There is real coming-of-age sexual tension between Wendy, whose story this is, and both Peter and Hook. Interesting trivia: the boy ... Read more »
Persepolis
Every once in a while you see a movie that’s not like anything you’ve seen before. It can be so different, in fact, that at first you don’t know how to react, your eyes and your mind have to adjust. It was that way for me with ::Persepolis}}, for the first ten minutes or so, and then I realized I was seeing something special and beautiful.
It is based on a series of ... Read more »
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Do we really need another High School Angst film? Do we really need another coming of age film? These are the questions whirling through my head as I slid the DVD into the player last night. Well, I needn’t have worried. This is a first-rate film.
In one of those coincidences that seem to keep happening if you watch a lot of films, one of the three stars here was Ezra Miller, who ... Read more »
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
They say that smell is the most primal of our senses, that the nose connects directly to the most primitive part of our brain. Humans have lost much of it, and still a scent can bring back memories when we least expect them. Imagine, then, a man whose sense of smell is as vivid as that of a dog. That’s what the German author Patrick Süskind did in his novel Read more »
People I Know
A has-been PR man with just one remaining client falls entirely by accident into the buzz saw of the real power players of the world. They are very nasty people, sort of like in Eyes Wide Shut. He witnesses a murder but is too stoned to even know he saw anything. He continues to try to put together a benefit opposing deportation of Nigerians, mostly because he ... Read more »
Revolutionary Road
The 1950s. Everybody smoked, everywhere, except maybe in elevators. Everybody drank too much. Men wore hats, and women wore high heels and bras that reminded you of ICBM nose cones. It was the era of conformity, of hordes of men in gray flannel suits, of Levittown, the ad biz, and the pointless rat race, the soul-killing pursuit of the dollar and the corner office. It was an era of ... Read more »
Pennies From Heaven
Everybody wanted to see The Jerk 2. Hell, I wanted to see The Jerk 2, too, but I was more than willing to wait for it. Steve Martin trained for six months to learn how to tap dance, and he got to be damn good at it. He will never be Astaire, but he had the guts to put himself into an Astaire movie and not disgrace himself. And we did ... Read more »
The Return
A father returns to his two young sons after a 12-year absence. He takes them on a fishing trip, but he’s actually up to something else. We don’t know what it is, and we never find out, because there is a rather stunning surprise. Lots of question are unanswered in this moody, dark film, and I wish I knew more than I know, but I liked it. This is the first movie for director Andrei ... Read more »