Movie Reviews
Titles starting with P
Panic in Year Zero!
Here’s a movie that doesn’t screw around getting into the action. For five minutes Ray Milland and his wife Jean Hagen and son Frankie Avalon and daughter Joan Freeman are a happy family setting out in their gigantic Mercury Monterrey, pulling a camping trailer into the hills north of Los Angeles. There is a bright flash of light, and everything changes. They see the mushroom cloud to the ... Read more »
Panic Room
Jodie Foster made a series of pretty damn good thrillers starting with this one, and going on to Flightplan, Inside Man, and The Brave One (really more of a Death Wish vigilante/revenge flick).
A panic room is a place within a house or apartment where the residents can retreat in the event that ... Read more »
Pan’s Labyrinth
A few weeks ago we were at Graumann’s and saw some five coming attractions. Four of them seemed to be based on “graphic novels.” Actually, one was based on Spiderman, which was still called a comic book when it debuted, before everything got all artsy-fartsy. I’ll tell you what I think, my friends. Comic books are bubble gum. Now, you can ... Read more »
The Paper
I thought I had seen most of the movies Ron Howard has directed, but this one must have sneaked by me, sandwiched between Far and Away and Apollo 13. Most of it struck me as pretty routine, which is not to say un-enjoyable. Michael Keaton is the sort of work-driven man who should never marry and have a family, ... Read more »
The Paper
A great cast, with Michael Keaton, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Randy Quaid (before he got plumb crazy) and Robert Duvall. They all work at a New York Tabloid, and we see the sleazy conferences where they follow the old adage “If it bleeds, it leads.” Then they get a story where they know they are being led down the garden path by the NYPD, concerning two entirely innocent black young men ... Read more »
Papillon
They don’t come more brutal than this. It is based on the memoirs of Henri Charrière, who really was sent to the penal colony of French Guiana, and later to Devil’s Island. If you had to choose between the Turkish prison in Midnight Express and French Guiana, you should opt for Turkey.
He spent seven years in solitary confinement for trying to escape. ... Read more »
The Paradine Case
The amazing about this movie is not that it is relatively minor Hitchcock, but that it’s any good at all. This was the last film under Hitch’s seven-year contract with David O. Selznick, and I’ll bet he was glad to be shut of the bastard. Alfred and Alma wrote a first draft from a novel, and brought someone in to polish it, but Selznick didn’t like it. Shooting began, and every day when he ... Read more »
Paranormal Activity
I can’t help it, this is the sort of story I just eat up. Not the story the movie tells (though it’s a good one), but the story of the movie. The writer/director, Oren Peli (who???) had never made a movie, but he figured, How hard could it be? So he wrote a scenario—there never was a real script, he had his actors improvise—bought a video camera, and shot the ... Read more »
ParaNorman
A bit of a disappointment. I wanted to like this more than I did. It was fabulously made, and it’s real hard to believe that it was done in stop-action animation in these days of CGI. But it was, by a company here in Oregon. Hillsboro, to be precise, which is a few miles west of Portland, part of the metro area. And it is the first stop-action film to be made in 3D. Moving all the hundreds ... Read more »
Parasite
First, I have a bone to pick with the Academy. It is just not fair for a movie to compete for Best Picture and Best International Picture (a new category replacing Best Foreign Language Picture). I think the producers should have to choose. Go up against four other non-English films, or roll the dice for the Big One. Please understand, I do Read more »