Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

(2008)

The best I can say about this is that it was competent. But it tried to take on too much story, and spent too much time with characters I thought were peripheral, at best. (The first one wasn’t much better.) The funniest parts again involve the four penguins, but they are too few and far between. It also suffers from the too-frenetic syndrome, which infects almost Read more »

Madame Curie

(1943)

You don’t watch these ‘40s biographies to learn about the people being profiled, at least not if you have any sense. They will follow the grand outlines of the life of the person in question, where they were, the notable things they did (though those events can be seriously skewed, too), but everything else is made up by the screenwriter. I have no idea—though I strongly doubt it—if Pierre ... Read more »

Madame Rosa

(La vie devant soi, France, 1977)

Translates as The Life Ahead. Simone Signoret is the title character. She is an elderly French Jew, a former prostitute, an Auschwitz survivor. She lives in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris, which at that time (maybe still, for all I know) was a real ethnic mix. She babysits for the whores on the street, and has two young men who live with her full time: ... Read more »

Made For Each Other

(1939)

I usually cut a lot of slack for these movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s, but this one just got my goat. It reminded me of a much superior film also starring Jimmy Stewart, It’s a Wonderful Life, but doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence. Jimmy and Carol Lombard meet and get married in 24 hours. Even I found myself agreeing with his boss and his mother ... Read more »

Made in Dagenham

(UK, 2010)

Here’s a fun movie about labor organizing that will surely remind you of Norma Rae, and possibly of The Pajama Game. Who can resist a story about the little people rising up against the people who are exploiting them? I sure can’t. This one is about a strike in 1968 at a Ford plant just outside London. Ford employs 40,000 men and 187 ... Read more »

Mafioso

(Italy, 1962)

Antonio is a Sicilian who left the island years ago and has made a life for himself in Milano, where he is happily married with two daughters. But he feels the pull of Sicily, and returns with them to visit his family. He’s sort of an Italian Clark Griswold, he overdoes anything he attempts, so he assures the wife that it’s not what she’s heard it is, crawling with Mafia thugs, in fact, ... Read more »

The Magdalene Sisters

(Uk, Ireland, 2002)

One of the best of the sub-genre of movies dealing with the atrocities committed by the Catholic Church, or the Catholic-dominated government, of Ireland. I’ve seen half a dozen of them, and they all boggle the mind. This particular one lasted until 1996, if you can believe it. Young women were consigned to “laundries” that might horrify a San Quentin inmate, without trial, for ... Read more »

The Magic Christian

(UK, 1969)

So we recently saw Candy, a disaster of a comedy, and then moved right on to this, another black comedy from Terry Southern. Peter Sellers is a multi-billionaire who adopts Ringo Starr (who once again proves that he is no movie actor) as his son, and enjoys demonstrating that people will do absolutely anything if the money is right. To prove it, he pays stacks of ... Read more »

Magic in the Moonlight

(2014)

(Contains spoilers) Woody Allen has his genius days, and his mediocre days. This is one of the latter. It’s an amusing romantic trifle.

It is 1928, and Colin Firth is a famous stage magician who goes to the home of a fabulously rich family in the south of France, intent on exposing a young woman who claims to be a psychic. Right away we think of Houdini. As if we didn’t have enough ... Read more »

The Magnetic Monster

(1963)

Here’s a perfect illustration of two sort of sad facts. One, I’ll bet a lot of drive-in audiences were pretty pissed off at this film. There is no “monster,” as most patrons would expect. It’s about some mysterious “element” that absorbs energy and turns it into matter, doubling in size every 11 hours. Soon, it will be heavy enough to knock Earth out of its orbit. It also manifests ... Read more »