Movie Reviews
Titles starting with B
Buried
Here is probably the ultimate claustrophobic movie. I recently watched Lebanon, which took place entirely inside an Israeli tank; this one takes place in a coffin buried somewhere in the Middle East. Ryan Reynolds is a truck driver who was kidnapped and knocked out. When he wakes up he finds he is buried in a coffin with nothing but a Zippo, a cell phone, and a ... Read more »
Burke and Hare
… were notorious grave robbers and body snatchers in 1828. Medical researchers in Scotland at the time were desperate for cadavers to learn on, and a new law and a drying up of the most plentiful source of stiffs, people who had been hanged, prevented them from getting what they needed. When there is a demand, a supplier will be found, and for a short time William Burke and William ... Read more »
Burlesque
This movie reminds me a little of Frankenstein’s monster. Take an arm from corpse A, a leg from corpse B, a head from … now where did I put that head? Igor, have you seen a spare head around here? So you take a little Showgirls without the full-frontal nudity (small-town girl comes to the Big City to make it), a little 42nd Street ... Read more »
Burn After Reading
You could call this the Coen Brother’s take on the spy thriller genre, but you’d be stretching a point. It has a few spies in it, and the chief thing that distinguishes them from the civilians is that they are not quite as dumb. But it’s a close call, especially the Department Head played wonderfully by J.K. Simmons, who never quite understands what’s going on ... Read more »
BURN-E
How many Pixar animators does it take to change a light bulb? Thousands, apparently …
Normally I wouldn’t review an 8-minute short here, but this is special. It’s included on the DVD of WALL-E (or at least on the version I bought, which is the 3-disc edition; it’s on the first disc, with the feature), a little bonus for the buyer. And it is absolutely Read more »
Burnt By the Sun
Oscar for Best Foreign Language. It’s 1936, not long before the world would begin the Great Patriotic War. But in Russia another horror is well under way: the Great Purge, when Stalin eliminated most of the Red Army’s officers and as many as two million others. Basically, anyone who had any chance whatsoever of challenging the paranoid, psychotic monster. Colonel Kotov (played by the ... Read more »
Bus 174
Documentary. In 2000 in Brazil a man took over a bus after a robbery went wrong. For most of the day he held 10 hostages as crowds swirled around, completely uncontrolled by the police, whose ineptitude is astonishing. All this was covered live by every TV station in Rio. The movie shows all this, and the conditions that produced this poor, confused, drug-addled young man, who saw his ... Read more »
Busy Bodies
Laurel and Hardy in a sawmill. The mind reels at the havoc they could wreak in such a place, and they find every possible way. This is one of the films where they famously destroyed cars in interesting ways. I have seen them driving cars that have been squished almost flat from front to back, or side to side. One car was twisted in such a way that it was bent into an arc and could only ... Read more »
The Busy Body
Though I don’t have an actual list, Donald E. Westlake in all his various incarnations would be in my Top Five favorite authors, no question. He got his start churning out soft-core porn in the early ‘60s, mostly under the house name of “Alan Marshall.” Here and there he produced a more quality book under his own name. Then he created “Richard Stark,” who wrote some of the best tough-guy ... Read more »
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
This is one that a lot of critics missed at first, as they did Bonnie and Clyde and 2001: A Space Odyssey. By that I mean they wrote negative reviews, then looked at it again after it had become a smash hit solely by word of mouth (adjusted for inflation, it is the 34th most money-making film in history!), and saw the things they ... Read more »