Movie Reviews
Mother and Child
Sometimes you are pretty sure in the first 15 minutes where a movie will end up in the final reel. And sometimes you are wrong. Annette Bening gave up a baby girl for adoption at the age of 14. It’s 37 years later, and the child, Naomi Watts, is a lawyer successful in her field but unable to form close relationships. She has an affair with Samuel L. Jackson and becomes pregnant, in spite ... Read more »
Mostly Martha
Mostly Martha (Bella Martha) (Germany, 2001) Mmmmmmmm-mmmm good! I love food movies. Eat Drink Man Woman, Chocolat, Big Night, Babette’s Feast, Like Water for Chocolate … there’s all those and plenty of others, and I can’t think of one I didn’t like. Is it just good luck? Or is there something that inspires a director to go that extra visual and ... Read more »
The Most Dangerous Game
The old story about a hunter (Leslie Banks, hamming it up like Dracula in an island castle) who is bored with knocking over tigers and elephants and now hunts human game. Soon a very young Joel McCrae and Fay Wray are fleeing through a studio jungle with Count Zaroff the Cossack in hot pursuit. Robert Armstrong is present as Wray’s brother, and overplays as always with possibly the world’s ... Read more »
Morvern Callar
I’ve seen good movies about alienated youth, but there has to be some attraction, and this Scottish effort doesn’t. Morvern is so disconnected from life that when her boyfriend dies of an overdose, she steps over his body, which lies in a doorway in their apartment, never bothering to move him. Yuck.
Morons From Outer Space
One of my favorite little comic movies. Aliens from space crash-land on Earth and turn out to be stupid trailer trash. I laughed a lot.
Morning Glory
Rachel McAdams is tremendously appealing, and carries this movie. Her character, who is trying to turn around the lowest rated morning show on TV, is so gung-ho that twice people ask her if she’s about to burst into song after one of her cheery pep talks. Harrison Ford plays a cranky newsman of the old school, the kind who believes that covering cute little kittens and chatting up all the ... Read more »
The Morning After
Jane Fonda is an alcoholic small-time television actress who wakes up one morning with no memory of the night before, and a dead man lying next to her. Which is the answer to the movie trivia question “What is worse than waking up to find a bloody severed horse’s head in your bed?” “Heart attack?” Jeff Bridges asks later when he hears of it. “Yeah, caused by a knife in his heart,” she ... Read more »
Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment
The 1960s was an exciting time for British film. Directors there were experimenting, taking chances their American counterparts wouldn’t be tackling for some time. A year before the summer of love in San Francisco, at the beginning of the Beatle phenomenon, people still thinking in terms of mods and rockers. Carnaby Street, Mary Quant, Twiggy. This movie tells the story of a man maybe a ... Read more »
The More the Merrier
There was no actress better in the screwball comedies of the late 1930s and early ‘40s than Jean Arthur. You want proof? How about The Talk of the Town, The Devil in Miss Jones, and that wonderful Frank Capra trio, You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Joel ... Read more »
Mush and Milk
A bunch of kids in a boarding school run by an awful old woman. After they milk the cow Pete the dog knocks over the pail, so they mix up some more milk from plaster of Paris. James Finlayson, master of the double-take-and-slow-burn, has a small role.