Songs From the Second Floor

Written and directed by Roy Andersson. Hardly a film I’d recommend to everybody, and yet I find that many of the images of it have lingered. Call it a Beckett play staged in Edward Hopper paintings. If anything, it reminds me of Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), the famous surrealist short by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. Any “plot” here is an ... Read more »

Sons of the Desert

This has to be in my list of Top Five Laurel and Hardy features, a list I don’t actually keep. In fact, it is the first of their really classic features, the first in a long string of some of the best comedies ever made, a streak that didn’t really peter out until the mid-1940s when they left Hal Roach and the other studios didn’t really understand what they were all about. Sons of the ... Read more »

Sorcerer

Sorcerer (1977)and The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur) (France, 1953) We just saw the former film, me for the second time, Lee for the first. It’s been some years since I saw the latter, but I’ve seen it at least three times, so I remember it well. It struck me that it might be useful to review them both, to compare ... Read more »

A Sound of Thunder

A Sound of Thunder (2005) (USA, UK, Germany, Czech Republic) Here’s one more example of someone taking a classic SF story and totally ruining it. Every once in a while someone gets it right. Philip K. Dick has done reasonably well with short stories, though there are plenty of turkeys, too. Heinlein’s All You Zombies was made into an excellent, and totally ... Read more »

Source Code

This is about as close as we get to “hard” science fiction these days. I’m not complaining. I liked it, a lot. The premise is that it’s possible to somehow transport a consciousness back in time to the body of someone who is dead, relive his last eight minutes of life … and do something about it. In other words, every time you go back to the same eight minutes, ... Read more »

The South (El Sur)

Sometimes you just can’t catch a break. This marks two evenings in a row that we were lured into watching a movie that just stops, with no resolution. As I said in my review of I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, it is possible to make me like an ending like that, but it’s very rare. I hated the ending of that one, and I’m stunned by the ending of this one. I won’t even ... Read more »

Southland Tales

Going in, I didn’t realize this was the second film by Richard Kelly, the writer-director of Donnie Darko, which is a film that has a cult following that does not include me. (I gave it my shortest review to be found in these pages: “Huh?”) If you liked that film you possibly should disregard this review. Because this one is way, way, ... Read more »

Spaceballs

I don’t know what the hell happened to Mel Brooks. After making some of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, he just sort of petered out beginning with this one. Then came Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and finally Life Stinks, which stunk. As for the others … something about the ... Read more »

Spanglish

It’s hard for me to watch an Adam Sandler movie because of the possibly irreparable damage he has done to the American comedy movie … but he’s okay in this. No vain mugging. And I liked a lot of the parts of the movie, particularly the two Hispanic actresses. But it comes up short. It just isn’t believable.

Flor goes to work for a woman who thinks she is liberal and ... Read more »