Movie Reviews
What’s New, Pussycat?
Woody Allen’s rise to fame in the 1960s was pretty meteoric. When he was eighteen years old he was on staff writing gags for Sid Caesar, making more money than his parents were. He moved on to stand-up comedy, which made him so nervous he frequently threw up. Soon he became a successful playwright (Don’t Drink the Water), and wrote this movie. He is on record ... Read more »
The Anniversary Party
Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming co-wrote and co-directed this multi-character study of people in the film business, and they seem to have enlisted most of their friends. It’s a fabulous cast, including Read more »
Anna Karenina
I was a little surprised to realize that, of the 29 versions of this story listed at the IMDb, I had seen approximately … none of them. Not being much of a reader of classic Russian novels, I don’t even know the story. So I came to this with no preconceptions, except I knew the costumes would be gorgeous.
And they are, probably well over a thousand of them (Oscar for Costume ... Read more »
Attenborough’s Life Stories
This is a three-part series shown on the PBS Nature program. It takes the form of dear old David‘s life in the wild, as much as anything else, a retrospective of his almost sixty years of going to the wild and distant places of the world and filming what he ... Read more »
Argo
First of all, I really liked this movie. It’s all a movie should be: frightening, funny, well-written and well-acted, skin-of-your-teeth excitement, even though you know how it all comes out. This is so, so hard. The best ever at this tough dramatic challenge was the original The Day of the Jackal, but this one ... Read more »
Armored Car Robbery
There’s a title for you, not overly dramatic but straight to the point. Like a listing in a textbook or something. And that’s exactly what this movie is, straight to the point. It’s only 67 minutes long, and it wastes none of them. There’s not a lot of time spent on characterization, but it’s not really needed. There’s the four tough guys pulling the ... Read more »
2012 Tropfest New York
We had never heard of Tropfest. It seems it is the world’s largest festival for short films. When I say short, I mean short. The maximum running time is seven minutes, credits included. It began small in Sydney in 1993 and gradually expanded, sort of like Sundance. Now it’s a pretty big deal, having had festivals in Abu Dhabi, London, ... Read more »
5 Against the House
TMC was running a day full of films about heists. I love those films, and we caught a couple I hadn’t seen. Here a group of four students at “Midwestern College” are on a toot in Reno. Back on campus one of them comes up with a scheme to rob Harold’s Club. (When my family went west when I was 14, there was a sign for ... Read more »
Arbitrage
Gee whiz, what kind of country is it where a businessman can’t “borrow” 418 million dollars from one of his companies (off the books, of course) and use it to temporarily plug a huge hole in another of his companies caused by a bad investment in Russian copper mines? It’s my money, isn’t it? (Well, not actually, it belongs to the stockholders, but when you handle ... Read more »
Angel Face
It sometimes seems to me that every B&W movie made between about 1938 and 1958 that wasn’t a comedy, musical, western, or war story is classified as film noir by somebody. This is one, but my definition is a little stricter. I think a noir film should have some connection with sleaziness, the streets, the underworld, the underclass. Here, we have a working-class guy caught up in ... Read more »