Movie Reviews
Coco
I go into a Pixar film expecting a good film, maybe even a masterpiece, but I wasn’t prepared to start loving this one before the opening credits! No kidding, you know the traditional Disney intro where we pull back to reveal Sleeping Beauty’s castle, with fireworks exploding all around and Tinkerbell flying over it? The music behind the animation is always “When ... Read more »
Miles Ahead
Here’s a film about Miles Davis, possibly the most innovative (along with Charlie “Bird” Parker) jazz musician ever, and it’s not really about the life of Miles. Here’s what director-writer-star Don Cheadle had to say: “The approach to the film was not to produce a biopic but to create plausible though largely fictional vignettes of Davis’ life that interpreted the creative process ... Read more »
The Commuter
Bang-bang chop-socky shoot-‘em-up pictures starring Liam Neeson, the world’s most elderly action star, can be engaging, in spite of their sheer improbability. We enjoyed Taken, because it was tense and well-made, and stayed just within the knife edge of possibility. He was 56. Then they made Taken 2, when he was 60, and it slid over ... Read more »
My Cousin Rachel
It’s from a novel by Daphne du Maurier, a novelist who I have not read. Her short story was the source material for Hitchcock’s The Birds and Rebecca. It takes place in Cornwall, at a time that is not quite specified, but I assume is the Victorian Era. It concerns the strange relationship of Rachel and young Ambrose, named Upper Class ... Read more »
Atomic Blonde
I was in the mood for an action movie, and this one got off to a fairly good start … but then I just couldn’t take it. The level of cool was relentless and increasingly silly. Sure, I know this takes place in that James Bond fantasy world where spies are glamorous. I don’t need all my spy fiction to be like John Le Carre, where the espionage trade is revealed as what it actually is: the ... Read more »
Oscar Wilde
The story of Oscar Wilde is one of the great tragedies of the Victorian age. He was homosexual (a word never actually uttered in this film, though we hear of “The love that dare not speak its name”) though able to function as a straight man, fathering two sons. He was the greatest wit of the times, endlessly quotable today. He wrote short fiction, the best known being Read more »
Hiroshima
I’ve never seen a docudrama quite like this one, but I’d like to see more. It blends both black and white and rare color film from the World War II archives with staged material almost seamlessly. It tells the story not of the making of the Bomb, which I’ve seen many times before in films like Fat Man and Little Boy and many straight documentaries, but the story ... Read more »
The Shape of Water
So I popped the Best Picture of 2017 DVD into the player and sat back, thinking, Okay, can you show me a woman fucking a fish and not make me laugh? The answer was, Yes. But sadly, the answer to the question of Can you make me believe in a woman fucking a fish was, No. I tried and I tried to really like this film, since it Read more »
The Alienist
Taken from a best-selling book by Caleb Carr which I haven’t read but which Lee enjoyed. It is a ten-episode series from TNT. It is 1896 in New York City. Before there were psychiatrists as such, people who studied the make-up of the mind were known as alienists. The story here is the quest by the fictional Dr. Laszlo Kreizler to track down a serial killer who is maiming poor street ... Read more »
The Florida Project
Sean Baker, the writer-director, wanted to draw attention to what is called the “invisible homeless.” That means people who are not actually living on the street, but in budget motels. They have a roof over their heads, running water (and, often, running bedbugs), and a place to take a dump, but are only a week away from homelessness. Some of these children are growing up in the mighty ... Read more »