Movie Reviews

Dunkirk

(UK, USA, France, Netherlands, 2017)

We recently enjoyed Their Finest, a film about the making of a blatantly false propaganda piece about Dunkirk. Since Lee has sworn off war films, I went to see this one by myself, and it’s a very good one. One of the best things about it is that it doesn’t concentrate on phony heroics. It acknowledges that most soldiers, most of the time, are frightened to death ... Read more »

Their Finest

(UK, 2016)

By coincidence I saw two films about Dunkirk in the last month: the huge and fairly accurate (according to the survivors) Dunkirk, and this much more obscure one. This is about the making of a film about Dunkirk in 1940, shortly after the real event. It’s a comedy-drama, and we enjoyed it.
The plot … two screenwriters hear of a set of twins who ... Read more »

Nashville

(1975)

Robert Altman is one of my top ten directors. M*A*S*H is on my list of favorite films of all time. He made many great films (and a small number of stinkers), and this is one of those revolutionary ones that changed the shape of movies forever. His career had its ups and downs. He was in favor, then unpopular, then made a comeback. But Read more »

Witnesses

(Les Témoins, France, 2014)

Quite a strange TV series, which went for two seasons. It is set in Le Tréport, a small town 40 miles southwest of Calais on the English Channel. There is a weird, tiny funicular which climbs the cliffs that divide the town between upper and lower sections. The plots are far-fetched, maybe a little too unlikely. For instance, the first episodes of the first ... Read more »

HealtH

(1980)

Not a typo. Also known as H.E.A.L.T.H, and just plain Health. It is an acronym: Happiness, Energy, And Longevity Through Health. I can’t resist pointing out that the title in Germany was Der Gesundheitskongress.

When a male lion is defeated by a younger male, the first thing the new king does is kill ... Read more »

The Lost City of Z

(2016)

An Amazon production. Remember, when you pronounce this, to say zed, as the British do, not zee.

For the whole of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, adventurers and explorers (it was often hard to decide which was which) were obsessed with filling in all those blank spots on the map. The biggest ones were in Africa, or in South America, ... Read more »

Jack Taylor

(Ireland, 2010)

There were three seasons of three episodes each of this Irish TV series. They were based on characters created by Ken Bruen, a fairly prolific author, who wrote twelve Jack Taylor novels, with another set to be published in November, 2017. Many of the episodes are taken right from the books. Taylor is a train wreck of a man, a former member of the Garda Síochána, the national police force ... Read more »

Absolutely Anything

(UK, France, 2017)

It sounds like a good idea at first. A council of alien beings (voiced by all the surviving members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus), decide to grant a random human the power to do absolutely anything. Simon Pegg is chosen, and we quickly are reminded that one should be careful what one wishes for, as you might just get it. Every wish has a downside and needs to ... Read more »

Ghost in the Shell

(2017)

I know fuck-all about comic books, DC or Marvel or anything else, and fuck-even-less about manga, which I find totally incomprehensible. This was based on a manga that apparently was very popular. I’ve tried, and I can’t find much good to say about it. The design of the thing got some good reviews, and there’s no denying it’s extremely complex, but I think they went overboard. If you think ... Read more »

Beauty and the Beast