The Statement

A rather surprisingly bad muddle from Norman Jewison, a very good director. It concerns a Frenchman, Michael Caine, who was a Vichy policeman and ordered the killing of 5 Jews in 1944. He’s an old man now, having been protected by French police and right-wing Catholics. But it never amounts to anything. Caine is good, as usual, but the rest of the great cast isn’t given much to do. I ... Read more »

The Statement (second review)

Michael Caine, Tilda Swinton and Jeremy Northam star. Supporting are Charlotte Rampling, Alan Bates, and Frank Finlay. Norman Jewison directed a script from the great Ronald Harwood. What could go wrong?

It’s hard to put my finger exactly on it, but part of it was that I didn’t really care that much. Caine is a Frenchman who collaborated with the fucking Nazis during the occupation. ... Read more »

The Station Agent

We loved this little movie. It’s little in every respect: it is low-budget, there is no violence or overstated emotions, and the main character, Fin, is 4’6″. He is a train freak, and he inherits a small abandoned train station in New Jersey and decides to live there. He is very withdrawn, sick and tired of being a circus attraction everywhere he goes, he just wants to be alone. But ... Read more »

Stealing Sinatra

“In 1963 an event took place that shook the world … This isn’t it.”

This movie is “based on fact.” That is, the events took place. Frank Sinatra Jr. really was kidnapped a few months after JFK was assassinated, and it happened pretty much as it is shown here. Three guys … well, Lee said something like, if you added up all their IQs and expressed it as a temperature, ... Read more »

Stealth

When I saw in the New Times that the double feature at the Sunset was what were, by all accounts, the two dumbest movies of the summer, and maybe of all time, I briefly considered going anyway. But then I remembered what my granddaddy used to say when some unpleasant course of action was suggested: “Let’s don’t and say we did.” He’s right. Some movies are so, so ... Read more »

Steamboat Bill, Jr.

I was looking through recommendations at Netflix and happened on a Buster Keaton title. I clicked on it, and noticed the user rating was a staggering 5.0 out of 5. They direct you to other films and they had eight of them, the lowest rating being a 4.1. This is very high for Netflix, especially for films made 80 or more years ago. It reminded me of just how good ... Read more »

Steelyard Blues

In the 1970 there were some films—I hesitate to call it a genre—that were somehow, in some way not easy to define, anti-establishment. I’m not talking about Easy Rider, which was right up front about it. Not even The Strawberry Statement, based on the Columbia student protests and campus takeover. These were films like Read more »

The Stepfather

In 1987 a pretty darn good thriller came out, written by Donald E. Westlake, who also did the fantastic The Grifters. It had a very scary, very original psychopath as the central character. This man’s obsession was nothing new: He wanted a perfect family. His solution when his family turned out less than perfect, as they all eventually do, was nothing new, ... Read more »

The Stepford Wives

It sounded like an interesting idea when I first heard of it: remake the creepy but not really believable 1975 film about women being turned into robots as a comedy, and with a 21st Century sensibility. But this really never gets off the ground. The direction by Frank Oz was ponderous, I didn’t laugh once; all the one-liners were blown, the physical comedy didn’t work. Naturally this one ... Read more »

Stephanie Daley

Sundance had something to do with this small film. Like a lot of such indies, it didn’t get any distribution. It made a total of $25,073. (Yes, thousand, that’s not a misprint!), and never played on more than 3 screens, most of which were probably film festivals. No indication of what it cost, but a party scene was shot in the location manager’s basement, so it ... Read more »