Movie Reviews
Fargo (Third Season)
This is the weakest of the three seasons of the TV series sort of “inspired by” the brilliant Coen Brothers movie. (The Academy has made some really poor choices for Best Movie over the years, and one of the worst, almost as bad as naming Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, was giving the Oscar to The English ... Read more »
Sudden Impact
Lee and I have to admit that the Dirty Harry Callahan franchise is a guilty pleasure. I know it makes no sense for two old liberals to enjoy these idiotic shoot-‘em-ups, but go figure. We do. It would be easy to make quite a long list of things that are consistently stupid, even laughable, about them. I mean, Harry routinely kills two or three bad guys before breakfast. When his cases get ... Read more »
Straw Dogs
I always wonder why someone has the urge to remake a movie that was perfectly good the first time around. I’m on record as saying it’s usually a bad idea. But not always. This remake is astonishingly faithful to the original. Scene for scene, it replays the Dustin Hoffman version. I had expected that the action at the end would be ramped up horribly, but that’s not the case. Aside from ... Read more »
Straw Dogs
The late ‘60s and most of the ‘70s was a time of change in the movie business. The Motion Picture Code breathed its last, dying breath (and good riddance), so writers and directors were free to explore much stronger sex and violence, as well as tell stories where the good guys didn’t always win, and evil wasn’t always punished. Sam Peckinpah was in the forefront of the violence part of ... Read more »
Alien: Covenant
I noted with considerable alarm that Ridley Scott, a director I once had a great deal of respect for, is contemplating no less than six more Alien films. That’s in addition to Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Prometheus, and this one. At least one of them is a done deal: a sequel to this, which would make it a prequel ... Read more »
Deep Water
This is a four-part TV series that is based on the actual murders of somewhere between 30 and 80 gay men in the ‘80s and ‘90s. No one knows the exact number because … well, nobody gave a shit. Two police detectives, Tori Lustigman (Yael Stone) and Nick Manning (Noah Taylor) begin to suspect that there’s a serial killer on the loose. Tori is particularly fascinated by it because her brother ... Read more »
What Happened To Monday?
Noomi Rapace plays identical septuplets. They are named Monday, Tuesday Wednesday … you get the idea, in a future world where over-population, crop failures, and climate change have led to a policy of one child per family. Siblings are illegal, and the younger one has to go into the deep freeze to “wait for a better time.” Yeah, right, tell me another one. Clearly things are never going to ... Read more »
Get Out
Jordan Peele is part of the comedy team of Key and Peele, who I think are just about the funniest duo since Fry and Laurie. This is the first movie he has written and directed, and it could not be further removed from the sketch comedy they do. Every once in a while a movie comes along that’s not quite like anything you have ever seen, and this is one. Which sounds a little weird, because ... Read more »
The Day of the Jackal (second review, 2017)
Book and movie are both masterpieces, among the best thrillers I have ever read or seen. Frederick Forsyth worked a miracle here. How do you tell the story of an attempted assassination of Charles De Gaulle, when you know it didn’t work? By almost fanatical attention to detail, that’s how. We track the Jackal (a perfect performance by Edward Fox) from his hiring ... Read more »
Moana
This is either the 56th or 64th Disney animated feature, depending on how you count it. I go with the last figure, including films like Mary Poppins and Song of the South, which mixed live action and animation. I haven’t been actually disappointed with a Disney feature since Chicken Little back in 2003. I’d ... Read more »