Movie Reviews
The Arrival
A better than average SF paranoia film that loses it somewhere near the end, as so many do. But for a while there, it was pleasantly like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with one man knowing a terrible secret that he can’t convince anyone else is true. The aliens can look like us, so you don’t know who to trust. The ... Read more »
Army of Shadows
(France/Italy, 1969) An amazing film about the French Resistance. I’ve seen plenty of movies where the heroic fighters of the Resistance played a part. They blow up trains, they assassinate Nazi leaders, they smuggle weapons into France, they cause all sorts of trouble. I salute them. They were genuine heroes, refusing to ... Read more »
The Aristocrats
Hold on! Stop! You’re about to make a terrible mistake! The DVD you’re holding isn’t the 1970 Disney feature-length cartoon, The Aristocats. That one is full of talking animals. This one is full of … well, shit, plus every horribly ugly thing you have ever imagined in your darkest moment, and ... Read more »
L’Argent de poche
The IMDb lists the English translation as Small Change, but the title on the DVD was Pocket Money, which looks, to my extremely small knowledge of French, to be the more literal translation. This movie didn’t quite work for me. It has no plot—not a problem in itself—but it didn’t deeply involve me in the lives of the characters, ... Read more »
L’Argent
The title means “money.” The story starts out interesting enough, adapted from a work by Tolstoy. Some kids pass a counterfeit banknote, and after a while an innocent man is charged with a crime because of it. He loses his job, gets involved in a bank robbery, goes to jail … and ends up as a mass murderer. So … what? Money ... Read more »
Arabesque
I saw this when it was new with my great good friend Calvin Stanley. Not very far into it we began to notice something. In every shot where he could possibly justify it—and in many where he had to reach way into his cinematographer’s bag of tricks—director Stanley Donen would frame things so that we would see things ... Read more »
Apocalypto
What was Mel Gibson thinking? That if people would pay $611,899,420 to see a film in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin, they might pony up a similar amount for a film in Mayan? He forgot one thing, which was in The Nazz. But most of the other elements were in place, the fixation on violence and torture, in particular. The only thing it was really missing was Mel himself, getting the shit kicked ... Read more »
Antwone Fisher
Fairly routine drama. Denzel Washington has never turned in a bad performance, though I find it ironic that he won his second Oscar for one of his least interesting pictures.
Antonia’s Line
Best Foreign Language Film 1995.
This is one of our favorite movies. We watched it again, and it was even better than we remembered. There’s not a lot I can say about it. A woman and her daughter return to the mother’s village in Holland right after the war. There are births, there are a lot of deaths. Bad things happen, good things happen. We continue right into the ... Read more »