Movie Reviews
Titles starting with B
A Brilliant Young Mind
Is it gross and insensitive of me to say that I’m pretty tired of movies about autistic geniuses? It just seems there have been a lot of them since Rain Man, (which was about a savant, not a genius). We classify autism these days as a spectrum, with people like this boy in this movie on one end, which we call “Asperger’s Syndrome,” and really means just mild ... Read more »
Bringing Down the House
Everybody tries very hard to be funny. Too hard, especially Steve Martin.
Broadcast News
Holly Hunter is a fierce television news director. Albert Brooks is a crackerjack TV reporter. And William Hurt is an underachiever who just happens to be handsome enough to be a star news anchorman. It would have been easy to make this character a Ted Baxter WJM Mary Tyler Moore buffoon with an inflated ego and nothing at all going on between his ears. His saving grace is that he realizes ... Read more »
Broadchurch
The reviews of this new BBC series were very good, so we decided to look in on it. (Actually it was ITV, but is showing in this country on BBC America.) It was filmed in Clevedon, a town near Bristol in Devon, on the west coast of Great Britain, in the Severn estuary. It looks like a nice place, with a broad beach and some towering cliffs.
1. In the first episode Danny Latimer, an ... Read more »
Broadway Danny Rose
… is a third-rate talent agent who represents fourth- and fifth-rate talent. Maybe that’s too harsh. Maybe the talent is sixth-rate, but Danny himself is not so bad. He’s a hard worker, and he is loyal. And he really believes in the losers he handles, like the one-legged tap dancer, the balloon-tying artists, the stuttering ventriloquist, or the blind magician. He works hard to ... Read more »
Broadway Melody of 1936
The story is totally clichéd. The script is lame. The acting is second-rate. Robert Taylor looks puzzled as to how he ended up on this sound stage at MGM when he was supposed to be at Universal filming Magnificent Obsession.
What’s good about it? The choreography is nice. Frances Langford is a pretty good singer. Buddy Ebsen, in his first film, does his ... Read more »
Broadway Melody of 1938
Another movie designed to showcase the incredible tapping feet of Eleanor Powell. Her career only included 13 movies, not all of them starring roles, though she continued dancing in night clubs until the 1960s. This was her third big one, and she delivers all the spectacle we expect of her, along with dancing partner George Murphy. Robert Taylor is the love interest, but since he can’t ... Read more »
Broadway’s Lost Treasures
Broadway’s Lost Treasures (2003) Technically, they weren’t lost, just buried for a while. I’m not completely clear where these song and dance numbers came from, but it seems to be a mix of segments from a PBS program archive and performances done at the Tony Awards. Some feature just the one performer doing his or her Big Number from the Smash Hit Musical, or seven or eight on an ... Read more »
Brokeback Mountain
So at last we see the movie that stirred up so much fuss last year. The “gay cowboy” movie. And what do we see? Well, they were actually herding sheep. Does that make them sheepboys?
The movie is solemn, and overlong. And about halfway through you realize that, without the gay element, which I quickly began to regard as a gimmick, you’ve got a really conventional ...
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The Broken Circle Breakdown
When you think of great bluegrass music, the first thing that springs into your mind will obviously be … Belgium. Right? Okay, me neither. But in this movie, filmed entirely in Ghent, Belgium, and in the Flemish language (I guess; it seems there are many dialects of Dutch and Flemish in different regions of those tiny countries), you will hear some of the finest pickin’ and harmonizin’ you ... Read more »