Movie Reviews
City of God
One of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen. Hard to watch, the lives of these kids are brutal beyond belief, and it’s all based on a true story.
De-Lovely
When I heard they were making a movie about Cole Porter I thought, How bad can it be? The answer is, it can’t be bad, not with all that delovely music, but it can sure fall short of what it might have been. There is a big problem with Cole Porter’s life, which is that the first and second acts are fabulous, but the third act is awful. He had everything: huge wealth, wit, talent, acclaim, a ... Read more »
City of Ember
This might have been a good book. Tom Hanks and the other producers must have thought so, since they paid pretty good money for it and optioned the three sequels. But this one totally tanked, so I wouldn’t be looking for the continuing saga. It has the look of something that was cut down from a first cut 30, even 40 minutes longer. Everything is too hurried. The sets are massive, and look ... Read more »
Deliver Us From Evil
I’d better warn you. This is going to get nasty. If you are a Catholic who believes the church hierarchy is somehow above you, better than you are (which is what they believe, it’s doctrine; look it up!), then I’m giving you an especially strong warning. Get out of here while you can, before I insult everything you ... Read more »
City by the Sea
One of those forgettable movies. I saw it, I recall enjoying it, but I can’t remember a damn thing about it.
Citizen X
In the Soviet Union there is no prostitution. Soviet airliners do not fall from the sky. Crime is almost non-existent in the Soviet Union. Coal mines do not collapse, chemical factories do not blow up, nuclear dumps do not spontaneously spew waste over whole oblasts, and rocket ships do not explode on the pad in the Soviet Union. (All these things happened, and were covered up.) There is ... Read more »
Delicatessen
Jean-Pierre Jeunet got his start in commercials and music videos, where visuals are everything. He made five films in about a decade, none of which got any distribution in the US, none of them available on DVD, and then he made this one, then City of Lost Children, then Amélie, then A Very Long Engagement. ... Read more »
Déjà Vu
Time travel movies are tough, take it from somebody who wasted a large part of a decade trying to get one made. Science fiction films that really are science fiction, as opposed to comic book superheroes or space opera fantasy like Star Trek and Star Wars, is hard to sell, too, because you can count on critics who don’t understand it to ... Read more »
Definitely Maybe
I have long contended that the way you tell a story can be as important as the story itself. One of my favorite examples is Forget Paris, where we follow the story of a couple’s relationship as it is told by a succession of his friends to a woman who doesn’t know them. If you had told it in a linear fashion, it would have been just your standard boy meets girl, ... Read more »
Defiance
True story … though I suspect the details are a bit fanciful here and there. It’s 1941 and the Nazis in Byelorussia—now Belarus—are rounding up the Jews to send them to the death camps, or else simply killing them on the spot. (I’m ashamed to admit I couldn’t have pointed to Belarus on a map until a few moments ago. It’s east of Poland and north of Ukraine.) Most of the Bielski family has ... Read more »