Movie Reviews
Titles starting with M
Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment
The 1960s was an exciting time for British film. Directors there were experimenting, taking chances their American counterparts wouldn’t be tackling for some time. A year before the summer of love in San Francisco, at the beginning of the Beatle phenomenon, people still thinking in terms of mods and rockers. Carnaby Street, Mary Quant, Twiggy. This movie tells the story of a man maybe a ... Read more »
The Morning After
Jane Fonda is an alcoholic small-time television actress who wakes up one morning with no memory of the night before, and a dead man lying next to her. Which is the answer to the movie trivia question “What is worse than waking up to find a bloody severed horse’s head in your bed?” “Heart attack?” Jeff Bridges asks later when he hears of it. “Yeah, caused by a knife in his heart,” she ... Read more »
Morning Glory
Rachel McAdams is tremendously appealing, and carries this movie. Her character, who is trying to turn around the lowest rated morning show on TV, is so gung-ho that twice people ask her if she’s about to burst into song after one of her cheery pep talks. Harrison Ford plays a cranky newsman of the old school, the kind who believes that covering cute little kittens and chatting up all the ... Read more »
Morons From Outer Space
One of my favorite little comic movies. Aliens from space crash-land on Earth and turn out to be stupid trailer trash. I laughed a lot.
Mortal Engines
“Steampunk” is a genre within the science fiction genre that I’ve never really understood. These stories take place in alternate universes where the tech has not advanced beyond the Jules Verne stage, and yet they seem to involve massive, sometimes gargantuan, machines. Rivets, brass, bolts, steam hissing out of everything … these are all visual things, hard to sell in a written story. ... Read more »
Morvern Callar
I’ve seen good movies about alienated youth, but there has to be some attraction, and this Scottish effort doesn’t. Morvern is so disconnected from life that when her boyfriend dies of an overdose, she steps over his body, which lies in a doorway in their apartment, never bothering to move him. Yuck.
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears
I wondered what the title was all about. It seems it was a taken from a line in a Russian song. Like, things will work out for the better. And in this sweet little movie, they mostly do. Not totally, but when does that ever happen?
Katya, Lyudmilla, and Tanya are roommates in a dismal little “workers dormitory” in 1958. They are all from the country. Katya works in a machine shop, ... Read more »
Moscow on the Hudson
I wonder if it will ever stop being painful to watch Robin Williams perform? Everybody dies, of course, and we have lost a lot of irreplaceable talents who died prematurely in my lifetime, but seldom one so shockingly unexpected. It is sad when someone ODs, but we’re sort of used to it. Suicide? Unthinkable! He was so funny!
Well, anyway, this is one of ... Read more »
The Most Dangerous Game
The old story about a hunter (Leslie Banks, hamming it up like Dracula in an island castle) who is bored with knocking over tigers and elephants and now hunts human game. Soon a very young Joel McCrae and Fay Wray are fleeing through a studio jungle with Count Zaroff the Cossack in hot pursuit. Robert Armstrong is present as Wray’s brother, and overplays as always with possibly the world’s ... Read more »
A Most Violent Year
This is a nice little movie, but I have to make an objection right up front. I think the title is wildly inappropriate. Maybe it’s just me, I’ll admit that, but with a title like that it ought to be just a little bit violent, is that too much to ask? Okay, maybe that was the whole idea, to sucker us into waiting and waiting an waiting for the violent stuff to happen.
I guess it’s a ... Read more »