Movie Reviews
Titles starting with A
After Earth
Man, it must be nice to have Will Smith for a daddy. “What do you want for your 14th birthday, Jaden my darling?” “I’d like a movie, Papa.” “You got it, son. Let me call up the studio and ask them to write a check for one hundred and thirty million dollars!” I don’t really want to beat up too hard on the little apple of his father’s eye. He seems a quite ordinary ... Read more »
After Hours
This has to be one of Martin Scorsese’s weirder films. Not that he has confined himself to violent tales of the Mafia, though he has made a lot of those. But this one is just … weird. It follows Griffin Dunne on a late night ramble around Manhattan’s downtown area, when he meets Rosanna Arquette in a diner and is invited back to her apartment. Naturally, he is hopeful that he can score ... Read more »
After the Sunset
Lee asked me several times what the second feature was going to be as we planned a night at the drive-in to see Ocean’s Twelve. I could never quite remember. Was it Before Sunrise? Just After Dark? Dusky Twilight? I could never remember, just something to do with the time of day, and if you ask me a month from now ... Read more »
Against the Ropes
Meg Ryan hasn’t made a very good film for some time now. She seems to be trying to stretch herself, as in In the Cut, which turned out to be simply dumb, in spite of being directed by the acclaimed Jane ... Read more »
The Age of Adaline
She was born in 1906, and when she is in her twenties she is in a car accident, is struck by lightning, and stops aging. This eventually attracts attention from government types who would like to take a good look at her. She quickly realizes that life as a guinea pig isn’t for her, and learns to change her identity when she begins to look too young for her current one. She is now over a ... Read more »
The Agronomist
Haiti is a little country shaped like a crab claw on the western side of Hispaniola. In 1804 Toussaint L’Ouverture led a slave rebellion, the only successful one I know of. From there on, everything was pretty much downhill. (The Haitians had to pay the former slave owners, ... Read more »
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So far, November 2006 has been the month of big let-downs for me, movie-wise. First there was Rebel Without a Cause, which even most critics would agree that, though iconic, was not a very good movie. Then there was L’Avventura, which all the discerning people love, and I ... Read more »
Aimée & Jaguar
In 1943 in Berlin, there was apparently an underground resistance of Jewish lesbians … I know it sounds unlikely, but this story was based on an autobiographical book that was a major bestseller in Germany. This is the third German film about the war we’ve seen recently, after the rather odd Rosenstrasse and the ... Read more »
Airplane!
This may be the only movie I’ve ever seen that should have been preceded by a warning: THE PHRASE “DIE LAUGHING” MAY BE TAKEN LITERALLY HERE. WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK. The first time I saw it I really felt I was in danger of death from laughter. It’s not so much that any particular joke was lethal, it was the combination, the sheer balls-out willingness to do anything, ... Read more »