Movie Reviews
Burden of Dreams
Criterion Collection DVD. Recounts the epic tale of the making of the epic movie Fitzcarraldo. We don’t get to see Werner Herzog pulling a gun on Klaus Kinski (which he is rumored to have done), but just about everything else that could go wrong, does go wrong. It’s mostly because of Herzog’s obsession with filming a thousand miles up the river ... Read more »
World Without End
Just as in today’s cinema people of the future tend to live in horrible poverty, overcrowded, hungry, living in ruins or the overbuilt cities so beloved by set designers, in the ‘40s and ‘50s visions of a future world were usually of sanitized uniformity. This one is a great example. A quartet of astronauts are hurtled into the future and when they land, they find that humanity is divided ... Read more »
World Trade Center
When I first heard about it, I had to wonder if Oliver Stone was going to ride off into looneyland with some sort of conspiracy theory. Luckily he left that to the looneytunes director of Loose Change and other Internet bug brains.
This movie is very good, and very, very, very, very, very, very hard to watch. I don’t suppose I shall ever be able to ... Read more »
Bunny Lake Is Missing
A 4-year-old girl goes missing from her London school. The police (Laurence Olivier) are called in and the investigation begins. Before long we are all wondering: Does this child really exist? No one at the school can remember her. We the audience never saw her. The mother (Carol Lynley) and her brother (Keir Dullea) begin to seem a little off-center.
Can’t tell you much more than ...
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Wordplay
A few minutes ago I sat down to do the New York Times crossword, as I do every morning at breakfast and sometimes three or four times later in the day. This being a Saturday, it was formidable. Many people assume that the Sunday puzzle is the toughest thing out there, because it’s bigger. Not true. The Sunday puzzle may have a trick, such as the use of ... Read more »
Woody Allen: A Documentary
From the PBS American Masters series, this film is a two-parter that runs about four hours. I could only wish it had gone on longer, because this is by far the best look we have ever had at this real American master. It covers about 18 months, during which he was one of the judges at Cannes (which he wasn’t too enthused about). But the important thing is the it ... Read more »
A Bug’s Life
The second film by Pixar is probably the weakest of the eleven they have so far released … and it’s pretty wonderful. (We’ll have to wait and see about Cars 2 [2011] and Monsters, Inc. 2 [2012]. I’m suspicious of sequels, but look at the Toy Story saga, which just kept getting better and better.) I would say ... Read more »
The Woodsman
It takes some real guts to make a film where the main character is both a child molester and not a monster. It takes some guts to take the part, too, and my hat is off to Kevin Bacon (who I am only 2 degrees away from).
Pedophilia is something that runs the gamut from John Wayne Gacy to guys (like me) who look at a nubile 15-year-old and feel a hot flash of guilt because she is so ... Read more »
The Wooden Camera
Madiba and his friend Sipho are hanging around the tracks one day in Capetown when a man falls or is pushed from the train. Looting his dead body, they find some money, a gun with one bullet it in, and a video camera. Sipho takes the gun and Madiba takes the camera. They return to the squalid shantytown where they live, basically nothing but sheet metal and scrap wood and cardboard. They ... Read more »
The Women
The reviews for this were so abysmal I almost didn’t rent it, But the cast was so wonderful I didn’t see how I could pass it up. But … 13% at Rotten Tomatoes? That’s just about as low as it goes. Then I took a closer look. RT and Metacritic use some sort of weighting system that can be thrown considerably out of whack if, say, a whole lot of critics give the movie 2 stars, or 40%, or ... Read more »