Movie Reviews
Genius: Picasso (Second Series)
The first of these planned series on the National Geographic Channel covered Einstein, who I think no one will disagree was the genuine article. Series three will be about Mary Shelley. I really wonder about that. Clearly they were desperately casting about for a female genius, and there’s no denying Ms. Shelley was smart, but genius? I don’t think so. A genius ... Read more »
Loving Vincent
Pixar Studios have no greater fan than I, and I thought Coco was a terrific film. But this is the one that probably should have won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Probably. I’m pretty sure. The thing is, Coco, though it was gorgeous and stunningly detailed, didn’t show me anything new. This one does. It is made from 65,000 Read more »
In the Heat of the Night
There are movies that you remember where you were when you first saw them, and this is one. It was in a theater on Market Street in San Francisco, now long gone to urban development. The audience was pretty demonstrative, and they were solidly on the side of Mister Virgil Tibbs. There was cheering when Virgil revealed that he was a police detective, and not the ... Read more »
The Score (Second Review)
The heist is a clearly unworkable Rube Goldberg device of bypassed security, mechanical gizmos, and other such stuff, where the failure of any one of a hundred elements would spell instant disaster. But that’s what you accept when you watch a heist movie, or you shouldn’t watch it. You just sit back and watch it all revealed, as in classics like Topkapi and more ... Read more »
The Coroner
We are big fans of British serial TV drama. I can never quite put my finger on the differences with American shows, but it seems they are somehow warmer, cozier. I don’t mean just the Miss Marple-type shows, but even shows like this one, which deals much more in the real world than the fussy English tea tales.
This is what I’d call an average example. Jane Kennedy is the coroner in ... Read more »
The Hitman’s Bodyguard
Every once in a while a movie comes along where I just hate everything about it. This is one of them. It is loud, stupid, it wants to be funny and it isn’t. It is ultra-ultra-violent. And yes, I know this is meant to be comedy violence, no more to be taken seriously than a Tom and Jerry animated cartoon … but I couldn’t help it. It was too much, too motherfucking much.
Which takes ... Read more »
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
I went in dubious, and came out liking it. I had gotten the impression that it was a remake of the 1995 film, but it is actually a sequel. I hadn’t realized this was a franchise, made from a book, and including the film Zathura and a TV series to boot. In the first one children discover a board game that has the power to bring the creatures of the game into the ... Read more »
All the Money in the World
Here we have the story of how John Paul Getty, at the time the richest man in the world, refused to pay a $17,000,000 ransom to get his grandson, John Paul Getty III, released from a gang of Mafia kidnappers, and got an ear and a threat to send the rest of the boy back piece by piece. But the film will always be known for the very strange thing that happened when it was already in the can ... Read more »
Heartburn
I kept thinking, a film written by Nora Ephron, from her novel, starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, directed by Mike Nichols, ought to be a lot better than this. I didn’t like these people much, and I wasn’t interested in their marital problems. It was clearly based on Ephron’s own life, and I think it was a mistake for her to turn it into an experience she felt she had to share with ... Read more »
Logan Lucky
I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked this. I came in with high expectations, since it was directed by Steven Soderbergh, the man behind the Ocean’s movies, 11, 12, and 13. I enjoyed those enormously, unlikely as they were. I love caper movies, and these were some of the best.
This one was even better than I had hoped. Someone suggested this one ... Read more »