Movie Reviews
Titles starting with S
Slumdog Millionaire
This is the current front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar, and of the ones I’ve seen (and I admit, I haven’t seen many) it is the best. The only movie I can recall this year that I enjoyed more is WALL-E, and the Academy in its wisdom elected not to nominate that. The story is Dickensian, though tougher than anything Oliver Twist had to endure. It uses an ... Read more »
Slums of Beverly Hills
In 2013 Natasha Lyonne became well known for her role as Nicky Nichols, one of the inmates in the Netflix show Orange is the New Black. She got her start at age seven as one of the moppets on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and then landed a series of minor roles until this movie came along, where she got top billing over Alan Arkin and Marisa ... Read more »
Small Time Crooks
Woody Allen and Tracy Ullman are married, and have small fights frequently. He’s an inept crook, but he has this big scheme to tunnel under a bank and make millions. He needs a place to tunnel from. They rent a small storefront a few doors away, but they need a cover, so Tracy opens a shop and bakes and sells cookies. Meanwhile, Woody and his similarly inept cronies are in the basement, ... Read more »
Smart People
Dennis Quaid is a college professor mourning the death of his wife, and just going though the motions of teaching. He has a fuckup adopted brother (Thomas Haden Church) who shows up looking for a place to stay. He has a super-smart daughter (Ellen Page) who is not so much worried about doing well on the SATs, as fearful that she will not ace them, two perfect ... Read more »
The Smell of Success
Every once in a while a movie comes along that is almost impossible to describe adequately, and this is one of them. Maybe that’s why it seems to have done no business, and there is almost no information about it out there. Maybe no one knew how to market it. Which is a shame, in a way, because although it’s not really a good movie, it is Read more »
Smiley’s People
After Lonesome Dove, the BBC’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was my favorite TV mini-series ever. So I had high hopes for this one, produced by the same people and with most of the same cast, including the magnificent Sir Alec Guinness as the imperturbable George Smiley. Alas, though they tried hard, this book just wasn’t as amenable to ... Read more »
The Smiling Lieutenant
This one stars Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Miriam Hopkins. I wanted to see it mostly because it was directed by Ernst Lubitsch. His combination of wit and humor and sophistication was so unique and dependable they had a name for it: The Lubitsch Touch. I’ve seen seven or eight of his films, and he’s never let me down. And he doesn’t here, either, despite having Chevalier. ... Read more »
Smilla’s Sense of Snow
I’m always sad when a movie starts out showing a great deal of promise, and then loses it. And I really was enjoying it. Julia Ormond is fascinating as Smilla, who is half Danish and half Greenlandic … well, technically Greenland is part of Denmark, but 88% of the population is Inuit, the people we used to call Eskimos. She is half Inuit. She spent her early life in Greenland and is now ... Read more »
Smoke
This is the kind of small, no-budget film that I assume actors really love to do. There’s no money, but if the script is good you get a chance to really dig into some fascinating characters. This script is really nice. It happens mostly in a small tobacco store in Brooklyn. It’s on the corner of Prospect Park West and 16th Street, a block away from Prospect Park. The building is still ... Read more »
Snakes on a Plane
(Alternate title: Shit on Your Shoe.) This film is sooooooooo bad it’s not really worth the keystrokes I’d need to skewer it. It knows nothing about snakes, and it knows nothing about airplanes. One example of many thousands in the first 40 minutes (which is as far as we got): If you lifted a floor hatch in the cockpit of a ... Read more »