Movie Reviews
Titles starting with S
The Square
Here is an Australian version of the story of catastrophic mistakes and bad choices that can stand comparisons to such films as Blood Simple and A Simple Plan. Not quite as good as that first one, but that was a masterpiece, and this one is just very good. Oddly, it was also made by a team of brothers, the Edgertons, one of whom is an ... Read more »
The Squaw Man
There is some niggling among film historians, but this is probably the first feature-length movie to be filmed in Hollywood, beating out The Birth of a Nation by about a year. It was produced by Cecil B. DeMille, a man with zero movie-making experience. (He knew so little he filmed it with two different cameras, each of which used a different format for the ... Read more »
The Squid and the Whale
Bad title, great film. The squid and whale is a famous life-size diorama in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and it has great symbolic significance to this story, but the story is about a bad ongoing divorce and the effect of narcissism (mostly the father’s) on the two young boys in the family. A better title might have sold more tickets. These are Woody Allen ... Read more »
Stage Beauty
This entertaining, thoughtful, well-acted, well-written, good looking movie suffers from one unfortunate thing: It deals with the same theme as one of my favorite movies of all time, Shakespeare in Love. The older movie was set in Elizabethan England and this one is later, during the Restoration. In both instances women were not allowed on stage. Men played the ... Read more »
Stage Fright
There’s an amusing anecdote on the DVD extras. The movie opens with a huge stage curtain rising to reveal St. Paul’s Cathedral and the recent bomb damage around it. Cut to a car speeding directly at the camera. As the grill fills the screen, we cut away. This scene called for someone to drive right at the camera. I don’t know how they got it out of the way, but they did. Now, that was ... Read more »
Stagecoach
Here is one of the best westerns ever made, possibly the best of all time. The only one that comes to mind that might beat it out is The Searchers, also a John Wayne/John Ford collaboration. In fact, Wayne (who I didn’t like much as a man) is in most of the top ten on my own list. When he had a good script, a part he could sink his teeth into, and a good horse to ride, the man was ... Read more »
Stalag 17
I know I’m going to be in the distinct minority here. At the IMDb 95 out of 100 reviewers praise this to the skies. What’s even stranger to me is that I distinctly recall enjoying it when I first saw it, many years ago, and possibly even on a second viewing. But I am very sorry to say that this is a bad, bad movie. It is even offensive. And the sad part is that, buried deep in here is a ... Read more »
Stalker
If you ever suffer from a bout of insomnia I have a sure cure for it. Just start playing this movie and you are bound to snooze like a baby. I never fall asleep while watching a movie, but I felt myself nodding off several times during this one. It is the most soporific, most boring, least interesting, most deliberately obscure movie I have seen in a long time, ... Read more »
Stan and Ollie
The make-up jobs on Steve Coogan as Stan Laurel and John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy is just uncanny. Particularly Reilly, who is not a fat man, but you wouldn’t know it from the quivering jowls and deep-set eyes we see. The acting is very good, too. I kept thinking, it was a shame they didn’t pick some other point in the careers of the greatest comedy team of all time. They were going for ... Read more »
Stand Up Guys
Al Pacino is just getting out of prison after serving twenty-eight years. He’s met on the outside by Christopher Walken. We soon discover that Walken is under orders from a mob boss to kill Pacino, his best friend, because the reason he was in jail was for murder, and the person killed was the mobster’s only son. Doesn’t matter that it was an accident, because the idiot son started ... Read more »