Movie Reviews
Titles starting with S
Stuck On You
The Farrelly brothers have a lot of balls to make a comedy about conjoined twins— who don’t even look alike. There are some big laughs, particularly when they are separated and one finds himself walking sideways like he has his whole life, and they fall over when they try to stand up. Instead of going for their usual crude jokes they work hard to humanize the characters. But it ... Read more »
The Stunt Man
I loved this film even before I met and worked with the man behind it, writer-director Richard Rush. Then I liked it even more as he regaled me with stories of the making of, and about working with mercurial Peter O’Toole. It’s about illusion and reality, and uses the metaphor of film wonderfully. Things happen that could never happen on a real film shoot, but it doesn’t matter. Richard is ... Read more »
Subway Stories: Tales From the Underground
HBO held a contest for people to send in stories of their true experiences on the New York subways, and these 10 vignettes are the result. Each has a different director, the best known being Jonathan Demme and Abel Ferrara. I’m not sure I believe all of them; some sound suspiciously made-up. But most of them ring true, in that they are not neat, they don’t tie up as most stories do, they ... Read more »
Sudden Fear
I’ll admit to some prejudice here: I find Joan Crawford and Jack Palance to be two of the least appealing movie stars in classic Hollywood. It’s easy to see why someone might dislike Palance. He played some of the nastiest, scariest roles ever, including the one here. He might have been a perfectly nice guy in real life. I really don’t know. For some reason I never liked Crawford at all, ... Read more »
Sudden Impact
Lee and I have to admit that the Dirty Harry Callahan franchise is a guilty pleasure. I know it makes no sense for two old liberals to enjoy these idiotic shoot-‘em-ups, but go figure. We do. It would be easy to make quite a long list of things that are consistently stupid, even laughable, about them. I mean, Harry routinely kills two or three bad guys before breakfast. When his cases get ... Read more »
Suddenly
This is the film Frank Sinatra did right after his supporting Oscar-winning role in From Here to Eternity, and it announced that that film was not a fluke, that he could do more than sing and dance, as in On the Town and Anchors Aweigh. He is wonderfully menacing here, as a gangster who has contracted to kill ... Read more »
Suffragette
There is a big dishonesty in this film that I have to point out first. Meryl Streep is featured prominently in the poster and the advertising. And she is in the picture, playing the formidable Emmeline Pankhurst. But she is there for only one scene! She delivers a speech from a balcony, speaks briefly to Carey Mulligan as she gets in a car, and then she is gone. This didn’t sit very well ... Read more »
Sugar
Here’s an unusual little sports movie. You know the old plot of the poor boy who works his way up to the big leagues and wins the World Series in the seventh game by hitting a homer in the bottom of the ninth? This ain’t that movie. We get a look at the farm system in places like the Dominican Republic, where the aspiring ballplayers are not mistreated in any way, but groomed rather like ... Read more »
The Sugarland Express
In 1969 two losers named Ila Fae Holiday and Robert Dent sort of accidentally kidnapped a Texas Highway Patrolman and ended up leading a slow-motion chase through a lot of my old stomping grounds in southeast Texas, from Winnie to Anahuac to Port Arthur and Beaumont, trailing over a hundred cop cars and news vans. Through Houston and up to Conroe and finally to Wheelock, where Bobby wanted ... Read more »
Suicide Kings
This is probably a love it or hate it movie. I pretty much loved it. See, there’s these four rich kids (five, later, but one of them isn’t in on the plot at first) and the sister of one of them has been kidnapped. The abductors are demanding two million dollars, which none of them can get. So they come up with the bright idea of kidnapping a semi-retired mob boss, played by Christopher ... Read more »