Movie Reviews
Titles starting with Y
You Kill Me
I’ve enjoyed the films of John Dahl that I’ve seen so far. Red Rock West is delightfully evil, and The Last Seduction is simply one of the absolute best I’ve ever seen. Linda Fiorentino should have gotten an Oscar nomination—and won! This was by far the best performance of 1994, lots better than the winner, Jessica Lange, who I don’t ... Read more »
You Kill Me
I’ve felt for a long time that Téa Leoni is one of the most underrated actors working today. She’s great at comedy, anyway. Here she gets involved with Ben Kingsley, who is an alcoholic hit man. When the idiot drinks himself to sleep in Buffalo and entirely misses killing the guy he’s supposed to rub out, his boss orders him out to San Francisco to dry out. He’s reluctant at first, as I ... Read more »
You, Me and Dupree
Matt Dillon and Kate Hudson are getting married in an elaborate ceremony in Hawaii, but right from the start there are signs of trouble, first from her horrible father (Michael Douglas), one of those personable guys who will smile as he thrusts the knife into your gut. But a far bigger threat is Matt’s best asshole buddy, Dupree (Owen Wilson), a child-man who shows up at their house right ... Read more »
You Were Never Lovlier
With Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. Not a shining example of the genre. Johnny Mercer’s songs are mediocre, the dancing is uninspired, the plot is more than usually silly. In a movie with great singing and dancing I can ignore that—the plot in a film like this is typically nothing but a rack to hang the musical numbers on—but this one just doesn’t cut it.
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
(NEW REVIEW) There is one thing in common in almost all Woody Allen’s films, all his characters, and that is money. The people in his movies have it. They seldom sweat the mortgage or how they’re going to feed the children or keep their low-paying job. Some of them are wealthy, but most inhabit that hard-to-define zone between wealthy and middle-class. Upper middle? Lower upper? ... Read more »
Young Adam
Based on a book by the Scottish Beatnik Alexander Trocchi. (I’m sorry, that phrase just makes me laugh, I see a guy in a kilt and a beret. “Hoot mon, daddy-o!”) Ewan McGregor is a deck hand on a canal barge and has affairs with various women. In the process he is faced with a moral question, and ducks it, existentially. Nice to watch but not my thing. Best thing in it is Tilda Swinton, a ... Read more »
Young Adult
I’ve seen a lot of movies about toxic prom queens, but few as well-written (by Diablo Cody) and acted as this one. Charlize Theron left her crappy little home town after graduation and set up in the big city, ghost-writing a series of crappy novels for teenage girls. Now she’s 37. She still has her looks, but that won’t last much longer, and nothing else is really going right for her. ... Read more »
Young and Innocent
Young and Innocent (The Girl Was Young) (1937) This was not the first of Hitchcock’s innocent man movies, but it’s only the second, after The 39 Steps in 1935. This story is a bit simpler than that one, but they both have strengths. A young man finds a dead woman on the beach, and runs to get help. But he is seen fleeing, and when the police get there they find ... Read more »
The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet
Jean-Pierre Jeunet is one of my favorite directors, responsible for Amélie, City of Lost Children, and Micmacs, all gloriously weird and fantastical films. Since 1984 he has made only seven films. I’d sure like to see more, but if it takes him five years to turn out the stuff he does, I’m willing to wait. This is based on a best-selling ... Read more »
The Young and the Dead
What a stroke of luck to have happened on this title. We have visited the Hollywood Forever cemetery, it’s about a mile from where I’m writing this, and seen the graves of all the celebrities there and much of the rest of the place. What we didn’t know is that, by the late ’90s, the con-man who had owned the place (and refused to allow Hattie McDaniel to be buried ... Read more »