Movie Reviews
Le cercle rouge
A hugely influential movie from Jean-Pierre Melville, a French director who never made a big name for himself in America. Though it’s in color, this is the sort of movie that the term film noir was invented for. Nobody in it is very nice, but man, are they ever cool! Many directors of American thrillers count Melville as one of their heroes. The cast is ... Read more »
Laurel Canyon
Has Frances McDormand ever been bad in a film? I sure can’t remember one. I’m so glad she got her Oscar for Fargo, because she doesn’t have the glamour to be a leading lady except in quirky roles like that. This was a good film, three stars or so.
The Late Show
Robert Benton doesn’t have a lot of screen credits, but they’re mostly good ones. He’s won three Oscars, for writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer, and for writing Places in the Heart. He also wrote Bonnie and Clyde. He hails from Waxahatchie, Texas, a place in my heart, a little ... Read more »
A Late Quartet
The Fugue string quartet has been performing together for 25 years, and consists of First Violin (Mark Ivanir, a Ukrainian-Israeli with a lot of supporting film credits), Second Violin (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Viola (Catherine Keener) and Cello (Christopher Walken). Cello is the heart of the ensemble, the oldest of them, the man that keeps them all together and on the straight and narrow. ... Read more »
Late Marriage
At some point watching this, Lee said something like “This is the anti-My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” She’s right. In that one, ethnic families were a jolly thing to be endured. It was funny, trying to live with old-country values in modern America.
This movie is in an ethnic Georgian community in Israel, and these Georgians don’t fuck around. A 31-year-old ... Read more »
Last Train Home
Wiki says the population of China is 1,339,724,852. Over a billion of them don’t travel for the New Year’s holiday, but about 130,000,000 of them do. All at once. It is the biggest migration of humans anywhere on the planet, much bigger than the Hadj, bigger than the mind-boggling gatherings of millions on the banks of the Ganges. Most of them are returning to ... Read more »
The Last Shot
An FBI sting involves pretending to make a movie (this apparently actually happened). Matthew Broderick is the director, totally in the dark, Alec Baldwin is the FBI producer, who is gradually seduced, as everyone who has ever touched the movie business is, into actually wanting to make this turkey. The cast is to die for, especially Toni Collette, the situation is funny, there are a lot ... Read more »
The Last Picture Show
The dying little town of Anarene, Texas, is not actually Hell, but it’s a pretty good first draft. I’ve never thought of Hell (when I think about it at all, it is only as a mind game; there is no literal Hell) as eternal flames. It’s more like a doctor’s waiting room or the Department of Motor Vehicles where your name never gets called, or like a small town in Texas. I grew up in a small ... Read more »
The Last Man on Earth
I hadn’t been aware that Richard Matheson’s excellent 1954 novel I Am Legend had been made not just twice, but three times, until I saw this listing for the MGM Channel’s “Price of Fear” festival on Halloween night. I had seen Charlton Heston in The Omega Man (awful, just awful) when it was new, and saw the ... Read more »