Movie Reviews
Titles starting with N
The Nice Guys
Every once in a while a movie comes along and takes a tired old genre and breathes new life into it. That’s the case here with the good old “buddy” movie. It’s usually an odd couple thrown together who hate each other at first but slowly grow closer. The buddies are Ryan Gosling, a P.I., and Russell Crowe, who makes a living by beating people up. But he’s not an enforcer for anyone, he’s ... Read more »
Nicholas Nickleby
Hopeless sentimentality, unbelievable coincidences, inhuman villains, saintly women and protagonists … these are all things that couldn’t be sold in a book today, and they’re the things I cherish about Charles Dickens. It was a different world. Monsters like Mr. and Mrs. Wackford Squeers (Jim Broadbent and Juliet Stevenson) (and nobody could find more amusing names than Dickens) really ... Read more »
Nick of Time
Here’s one of the dumbest thrillers I’ve ever seen. Johnny Depp is a devoted father who is hoodwinked at the Union Station in Los Angeles by Chris Walken and a female accomplice posing as cops, resulting in the kidnapping of his little daughter. Walken hands him a gun and informs him that unless he goes to the Bonaventure Hotel and kills a certain woman, they will kill his daughter. Sure ... Read more »
Nickelodeon
This was one of the last movies on a list that, over the years, I have thought of as the “Why isn’t this on DVD?” list. Happily, the list has been constantly whittled down. The Knack finally came out, and so did Royal Flash, just recently. In fact, the only ones left are another Peter Bogdanovich opus, At Long Last ... Read more »
Night and Day
Of all the fabricated Hollywood “biopics” I have ever seen, this just may be the worst. And that’s setting the bar pretty high. That’s not even counting that the story totally ignores one of the central facts of Cole Porter’s life: His homosexuality. I don’t fault the writers for that, I understand that there was no way at all that they could even hint at that. But just take a look at the ... Read more »
Night at the Museum
When the museum closes, all the exhibits come to life and the new night watchman must deal with the chaos. A lightweight, inoffensive, and totally predictable summer movie that I’m sure I’ll forget all about within a year. But I have to wonder, do you think Ben Stiller and Hugh Grant were twins, separated at birth? A little of that stammering, hesitant, awkward delivery goes a long way. ... Read more »
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
The first one was certainly no comedy classic, but it did have a sense of fun, here and there, now and then. That’s almost completely lacking in this one. In the first one, when the scary T. Rex skeleton came to life, it was … scary! At first. And then the punch line was that it was just a big friendly dog who couldn’t resist chasing a stick and bringing it back to you. In this one, ... Read more »
A Night at the Opera
Some say this is the best film the Marx Brothers made. I wouldn’t argue with them, though my own personal favorite is Duck Soup. In fact, I prefer all the earlier, Paramount movies. Opera is wonderful, no question, but suffers from the same problem all the Marx MGM movies did, which was Irving Thalberg’s insistence that the movies have ... Read more »
Night Falls on Manhattan
Two cops, Ian Holm and James Gandolfini (two years before his big break as Tony Soprano), are staking out a place where they think Jordan Washington, Harlem’s biggest drug dealer, may be staying. Foolishly, they decide to go get him without calling for SWAT first. Jordan fires through the door with an AK or an Uzi, badly wounding Ian. Almost at once every cop in New York City (well, at ... Read more »
A Night in Casablanca
This movie was originally intended to be a spoof of Casablanca, which was already a classic. Groucho’s character was named Humphrey Bogus. But Warner Brothers threatened to go to court over the use of the word Casablanca, which they seemed to think they owned the rights to. So Groucho mounted a letter-writing campaign in The Saturday Evening ... Read more »