Movie Reviews
The Zookeeper’s Wife
This was a major disappointment to me. The story of the Żabiński family, Antonina and Johan and their young children, Ryszard and Teresa (still alive today), should have been compelling. Instead, I kept wanting it to show a little movement. It is extremely ponderous, when it should have been electrifying.
The Żabińskis were the directors of the Warsaw Zoo, one of the best in the ... Read more »
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
One of Robert Altman’s very best movies. It has to be in my Top Five, though I’ve made no such list. It’s classified as a “revisionist western,” of which there were many good ones in the ‘70s. They abandoned the standard tropes of the traditional western, and showed things in a much more believable manner. Here McCabe, when three bounty hunters come gunning for him, does Read more »
The Road to Perdition
It was a little hard for me to believe Tom Hanks as a Mob hit man in the 1930s. I just always see him as a nice guy. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t do a good job, and in the end he really is a lot nicer than anyone around him. He gets caught between an Irish boss, Paul Newman, and his son, Daniel Craig. Newman knows his son is a worthless psycho who is stealing from him, but family is all. ... Read more »
Cocoon
Here is a feel-good movie sort of in the mold of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It asks the question, “If you were real old, soon to die, and found a magic pool that restored your youthful vigor, would you take off on an alien spaceship?” Well, duh. It’s all very well done by Ron Howard, and stars a galaxy of old pros like Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley, Hume ... Read more »
Captain Fantastic
This one is bound to make you think. Viggo Mortensen and his wife are old hippies who have been raising six children out in the forest. They learn to kill a deer with a bow and arrow and butcher it. They learn other survival skills. It’s all sort of like a boot camp, and it looks brutal. But the kids seem to like it. And Viggo is not really a survivalist nut, though he sometimes looks like ... Read more »
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
Tom Cruise was always the wrong, wrong, wrong guy to play Lee Child’s popular character, Jack Reacher. He was wrong for it in the first one, and he’s wrong here. The first one had some good parts. This one has fewer of them. Don’t bother. And hope this is the last of the series.
3 Women
It got off on the wrong foot with me from the very opening frames. There was a long, long, slow, slow panning shot over a therapy pool full of old people and their attendants, and the music just instantly got on my nerves. It featured oboe, contra-bassoon, and flute. It was harsh, dissonant, random sounds like so much modern music. It was composed by Gerald Busby. Interesting side stuff: ... Read more »
Blood Father
I understand why Mel Gibson was attracted to this script. Mel has a Jesus complex, and likes any movie where he can be shown to suffer, and he suffers plenty here. Why anyone else would like it is a puzzle to me. In the opening scenes Mel’s junkie, drunken daughter, who has gotten herself involved with some serious drug dealers, is there when a mass murder happens, and in fact shoots one ... Read more »
Father Goose
For some reason Cary Grant thought it would be a fun change of pace to play a sloppy, disreputable alcoholic in his next-to-last picture. Not one of his better ideas. There’s just no way you can make Cary Grant look disreputable. This is set in the early days of the war in the Pacific, and he is dragooned into being a lookout on a remote little island, calling in Jap sightings to Trevor ... Read more »
The Getaway
Once more Sam Peckinpah pushed the boundaries of violence in the movies. This is a pretty standard chase, but with some things that surprised me. The violence is all done well, particularly a tense scene of killers stalking each other in a sleazy hotel. Steve McQueen is given early release from prison by Ben Johnson, who has a lot of political clout. The price is he has to plan and pull ... Read more »