Movie Reviews
Titles starting with M
Monsieur Ibrahim
I’ve always liked Omar Sharif. This Egyptian man can pass as any kind of Middle Eastern to American audiences, and this time he is a Turkish Sufi who has run a grocery store in Paris for many years. He befriends a Jewish boy whose father is depressive and cold. It all works very well, if maybe a little predictably. A great performance by Sharif.
Monsieur Vincent
The second Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film went to this little gem of a biopic. The Vincent in the title is Vincent De Paul, who became a saint in 1737, seventy-seven years after his death in 1660. I’m not much of a fan of the Catholic Church (please don’t accuse me of prejudice against Catholics; it’s the Church I don’t like, not the parishioners), but sometimes they hit the ... Read more »
Monster
All 5 Best Actress nominees this year were very, very good, but 4 of them ran into the monster performance of Charlize Theron, who I swear I would never have identified through 109 minutes if I hadn’t known it was her. It is simply the most awesome performance in a decade. Maybe more. It was much, much more than just make-up and a 30-pound weight gain. She seemed to be inhabiting someone ... Read more »
A Monster Calls
It’s about a child, Conor, whose mother is dying of terminal cancer. At night he is visited by a huge walking tree, voiced by Liam Neeson, and the tree tells him three fables. Each of them shows him a moral, until at last he is forced to confront his own demons. It’s done well, and the stories are interesting, but perhaps unsurprisingly it was a box office flop, barely even earning back ... Read more »
Monster House
I can think of a hundred haunted house movies, but nothing immediately comes to mind where it is the house itself that is alive and malevolent. (I’m sure there are such; I just can’t think of them.) This one is handled pretty well. I might have enjoyed it a bit more if I hadn’t been sitting in a hospital bed, my brand new knee flayed open and sewn back up, high out of my mind on oxycontin.
Monster-in-Law
So, after 40 years of retirement, Greta Garbo has decided to get back into the movie business, and as her return vehicle she decides to star in … Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster. Or Gidget Goes to Hawaii. This isn’t quite that extreme … but what was Jane Fonda thinking? Fifteen years she doesn’t make a movie, and then she ... Read more »
Monsters
Reminds me a bit of Cloverfield, and a pretty good Korean film, Gwoemul (Monster), in that they hold off on showing the monsters for a while. You don’t get a good look at them until the end. It’s low-budget, less than a million dollars, but surprisingly effective with its SFX. You can do an SFX movie without spending a hundred big ones. ... Read more »
Monsters, Inc.
The fourth Pixar movie is one of the best. It’s a wonderful concept. There really are monsters in children’s closets, and they really do try to scare kids. Why? Energy. They store the energy from the screams to power Monstropolis. The catch is, the monsters are terrified of human children. If one were to escape through the space warps they create behind literally millions of closet doors ... Read more »
Monsters University
There’s nothing really wrong with this movie, except for the feeling that we’ve been here before and no one really had anything all that new to say in this one. Pixar has proven with the Toy Story trilogy that it’s perfectly possible to make good sequels, but I had the feeling with this one and Cars 2 that it ... Read more »
Monsters vs. Aliens
Speaking of 3D … Drive-ins don’t do 3D (they’d lose too many glasses), so we had to make do with the flat-screen version of this one. Just as well. How many times do you want to see a paddleball flying into your face? When this came out I heard a radio interview with the director. He emphasized that he didn’t want to do the same old, same old with 3D, didn’t want to have objects projecting ... Read more »