Movie Reviews
Titles starting with A
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
A pretty experimental film for Disney. And, though the movie has its charms, I’d have to say it’s a failed experiment. It’s an action-adventure on the model of the Indiana Jones movies, though there’s no Indy character. It’s also said to be inspired by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, in that it starts off with a 1914 super-submarine searching for lost Atlantis. ... Read more »
Atomic Blonde
I was in the mood for an action movie, and this one got off to a fairly good start … but then I just couldn’t take it. The level of cool was relentless and increasingly silly. Sure, I know this takes place in that James Bond fantasy world where spies are glamorous. I don’t need all my spy fiction to be like John Le Carre, where the espionage trade is revealed as what it actually is: the ... Read more »
Atonement
So much of how you experience a film can be tied up in what you know about it going in. I wish that wasn’t the case, but it is. I knew only the bare bones of this story: A young girl misunderstands something she sees, tells a lie, and lives are forever changed. I also knew that the part of Briony, the liar, would be played by three different actresses, including Read more »
Attack the Block
Shortly after they have robbed a young woman, a group of teenage thugs from a London housing project encounter a crashed spaceship with an alien inside. They promptly kill it and drag its corpse around the streets. This was a very difficult film for me. It is probably the only time Earth has been invaded in the movies where I was rooting for the aliens to rip the guts out of the “humans.” ... Read more »
Attenborough’s Life Stories
This is a three-part series shown on the PBS Nature program. It takes the form of dear old David‘s life in the wild, as much as anything else, a retrospective of his almost sixty years of going to the wild and distant places of the world and filming what he ... Read more »
Au revoir, les enfants
Louis Malle was one of the greats, and he made films in both French and English. This one is autobiographical, and recounts his time in a Catholic school in occupied France, when he was eleven. The priest (one of the good ones) is sheltering three Jewish boys under assumed names. The protagonist, Julien, figures this out, and eventually they become friends. But the Gestapo arrives and ... Read more »
L’Auberge espagnole
You can only call this a European film. I’m not sure who produced it, but it concerns a group of young people sharing an apartment in Barcelona. There’s not much of a plot, but it’s not needed. We liked it.
August: Osage County
In the opening scene a young Cheyenne woman named Johnna (Misty Upham) is being hired by Sam Shepard as a cook-housekeeper-caretaker for his increasingly out-of-control pillhead wife, Meryl Streep. She is unflappable and outwardly impervious to the occasional racial digs offered by Meryl, but you just know that inside she is wondering “What is it with these crazy ... Read more »
Austenland
A good idea, that soon was piddled away on a script that never could bring me in, and some performances that were really pretty bad. Keri Russell is Jane, a fanatic Austen fan. She saves up and flies to old Blighty, to an improbable place where the world of Jane Austen is recreated by actors who cater to the lonely women who pay to come there. I kept waiting for something interesting to ... Read more »
Australia
Baz Luhrmann has made just four films in 16 years. I haven’t seen Strictly Ballroom, but I think I should. I thought Romeo + Juliet was a very interesting experiment, most of the time. I liked Read more »