Movie Reviews
Titles starting with B
Bolt
And so we come to the end of our chronological viewing of all Disney feature animated movies (including those that have some animation, like Enchanted and Mary Poppins). (We watched The Princess and the Frog out of order.) Now we’ll have to wait until Thanksgiving—I’m writing this on ... Read more »
Bomb Girls
Canada, being a part of the British Commonwealth, entered WWII a full two years before America did. Since it was too distant to be bombed by either the Nazis or the Nips, it was a great place to build war material for embattled and bombed England. This excellent series follows a group of women who, like their American counterparts later, “manned” the factories while their men were ... Read more »
Bombshell
Jean Harlow is wonderful in this comedy about the excesses of Hollywood. She plays a big movie star, an airhead supporting a family of moochers, subject to wild enthusiasms that typically last about ten minutes. When she decides to adopt a child she approaches it the same way she did when she bought her goldfish or her three bumbling English sheepdogs, cared for by her long-suffering black ... Read more »
Bombshell
How’s this for a cast? Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, and Margot Robbie, with supporting work from Kate McKinnon and John Lithgow as that mega-asshole, Roger Ailes. (Theron and Robbie were nominated for Oscars.) Three blondes, in the story of how Ailes was brought down for sexual harassment during the 2016 presidential race, the one that gave us The Orange One, an asshole buddy of Ailes. ... Read more »
Bon Cop, Bad Cop
(Minor spoiler) Here we have a Canadian take on the “reluctant buddies” action/thriller/comedy genre that has more examples than you can shake a hockey stick at. Think Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, or Felix Unger and Oscar Madison, with guns. Colm Feore is a cop from Toronto (the buttoned-down, stuffy one) and Patrick Huard is a cop from Montreal ... Read more »
Bon Voyage
Alfred Hitchcock made two 30-minute propaganda films to help the war effort … in French! They are in support of the Resistance, I presume to help both the Brits and the French in exile to keep a stiff upper lip. This one concerns the debriefing of an RAF flier shot down and captured over France, who later breaks out of prison and seeks help from the underground. We flash back and forth ... Read more »
Bon Voyage
A delightful French bon-bon. It reminded me most of those sophisticated Hitchcock thrillers of the ‘40s, such as Foreign Correspondent, with people running all over the place, plenty of comic relief, glamour, Nazis … the whole magilla. There is even a Macguffin in the form of some bottles of heavy water. It stars Gerard Depardieu, who apparently is in every ... Read more »
Bonjour Tristesse
Otto Preminger directed this study of rich people with too much time in their hands. Party, party, party! Dance the night away! Take a break and visit the casino! It is all too, too frantic, and there wasn’t a single person I gave a damn about. The title means, sort of, “Hello Sadness,” and Jean Seberg narrates it, letting us know ahead of time that this madcap whirl is going to end in ... Read more »
Bonnie and Clyde
I remember where I saw this during its first, controversial re-release. (It was re-released because Warners hated it so much they banished it to the drive-in circuit until a growing number of critical voices began to be heard.) It was in a packed theater in Sausalito, Marin County, and we were closer to the front than I like—and I like to sit pretty close. It stunned me, and pretty much ... Read more »
The Boogie Man Will Get You
This one was labeled a “spoof” of horror movies, starring Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre and no one else you’ve ever heard of. As if you weren’t sure it was a spoof, the music under the opening credits was so Munster-like that I seriously wondered if it had been the inspiration for that show. Boris is a kindly (not obviously mad) scientist who lives in an old ... Read more »