The Island

Starts out looking like a jazzed-up version of THX-1138: A sterile, spotless, soulless environment, everybody dressed alike. But something is obviously going on.

SPOILER WARNING

These people are clones, grown to replace the organs of rich people or to act as surrogate mothers for women too queasy to go through pregnancy. ... Read more »

Is Anybody There?

Michael Caine loves to work, all the time. Sometimes this leads him into projects he might have better left alone. This might be one of them. I say might, because we bailed out at about the halfway mark. It’s not that the movie was awful, or that Caine’s performance was bad; offhand, I can’t think of a bad performance by Maurice Micklewhite (his real name, and as good a reason for changing ... Read more »

The Iron Lady

Critical opinions seemed pretty uniform: Meryl Streep’s performance was awesome, but the film wasn’t very good. I agree with the first part, but not so much with the second. I felt it got rather weaker toward the end, and I question the strategy of trying to tell pretty much the whole life story of a famous person, rather than focus on one defining incident, but that seems to be the way ... Read more »

Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers

The title says it all. There are over 100,000 employees of private contractors in Iraq, handling everything from providing clean water to the troops (most of it is filthy) to trundling convoys of empty trucks back and forth because you get paid whether you deliver a cargo or not, to burning $100,000 trucks because they have flat tires, to the odd spot of torture at health spas like Abu ... Read more »

The Invisible Man

What I hadn’t remembered about this classic by the great James Whale is how funny it is. Claude Rains (whose face is not seen until the last 30 seconds or so) is really a cut-up, until he starts derailing trains and killing hundreds of people. The special effects must have been startling at the time, and actually, they’re still pretty effective, though the raggedness of film processes in ... Read more »

Intruder in the Dust

A black man is arrested for shooting a white man in the back, in Oxford, Mississippi. The question “Did he do it?” is never even asked, not even by the man who is going to be defending him. Not only is he black, he is uppity. The whole town gathers for the great fun of the lynching. Will they hang him, or burn him alive? Will the sheriff resist, or just throw open the cell doors? Get your ... Read more »

The Intouchables

You’ve seen this movie before. A disabled man (quadriplegic from a parasailing accident) finds a friend and rediscovers some zest in life. Only the details change. This one’s in France, “based on a true story,” the man is very, very rich, the new attendant is a black layabout named Driss from a huge Senegalese family, only interested in collecting his welfare check, and then he’s hired, ... Read more »

Into the Storm

Here’s an excellent performance by Irishman Brendan Gleeson as Winston Churchill that seems to me to have been wasted on a 100-minute feature when the story cries out for a 4- or 5-part mini-series. It begins in 1940 with the invasion of Belgium, the resignation of Neville Chamberlain and the new, wartime government formed by Churchill, and ends with his electoral defeat only weeks after ... Read more »

Into the Abyss

Werner Herzog’s film is about the death penalty, which he opposes, but it’s really about wasted lives, and ruined lives.
The wasted lives go beyond just the two human cesspools he interviews in prison, one on death row, one who might make parole in 2041, when he’s sixty. Their names are Michael Perry and Jason Burkett. They lived their blighted lives in Conroe, Texas. One day in ... Read more »

Intimate Strangers

A woman walks into a psychiatrist’s office and starts spilling her guts about the sexual troubles in her marriage. Trouble is, he’s not a shrink, he’s a bored and restless tax consultant. He is so stunned that he says nothing. She keeps coming back. Complications ensue.

You’re set up to expect a Hitchcock film here, both by the situation and the music, and some reviews I read ... Read more »