Movie Reviews

The Lion King

(2019)

I’m on record as saying that I have been surprised at how well the recent tide of live-action remakes of Disney classics have come out, by and large. Some actually rivaled the originals. But I’m not surprised that they eventually came a cropper, and it arrived in the shape of this wet hairball. (I mean that artistically speaking. Financially, it was a very smart decision, having made $1.6 ... Read more »

Von Ryan’s Express

(1965)

Colonel Ryan (Frank Sinatra) arrives at an Italian POW camp, to learn that he is the highest-ranking officer there. He takes over from Major Trevor Howard, the SBO (Senior British Officer, like Alec Guinness in The Bridge On the River Kwai), not without some anger from the by-the-book major. Said major has been hoarding food and medicine for an escape attempt, ... Read more »

12 Angry Men

(1957)

It’s hard to imagine a stagier movie (and I mean that in the very best sense) than this one-set, twelve-character offering from Sidney Lumet. And indeed the script was adapted by Reginald Rose from his teleplay for Studio One on CBS in 1954. Live television! Very primitive equipment. All twelve performances are terrific, anchored by the only marquee star, Henry ... Read more »

Terms of Endearment

(1983)

Larry McMurtry is one of the more versatile writers of his generation. It’s true that most of his novels are set in present-day Texas or in the old west, though he has ten novels that are neither, but even those are wildly different. He tends to write them in sets. He followed his masterpiece Lonesome Dove with a prequel and two sequels. After Read more »

Mank

(2020)

I think this movie could be enjoyed by someone who has never seen Citizen Kane. I think so, but I can’t be sure. What I do know is that for someone who has seen it at least a dozen times this movie is a valentine to Old Hollywood, and just chock full of information about the writing of the movie. Not the filming; the writing, which was done by Herman Mankiewicz ... Read more »

Driving Miss Daisy

(1989)

Best Picture. Best Actress: Jessica Tandy. And yet here’s another film that has become a bit problematic. There are these memes circulating out there under the names like “white savior” and “magic Negro.” I think this one has been accused of being the latter. I’m not entirely sure what the term means, and am not really moved to make a search. It sometimes seems to me that there are a lot ... Read more »

The Color Purple

(1985)

You gotta wonder if this could have been made today. By that I mean directed by a white man, Steven Spielberg, and scripted by a white man, Menno Meyjes. Wouldn’t someone cry cultural appropriation? Shouldn’t all films about black people be written and directed by black people, or at least by “people of color?” I ask this sincerely, not sarcastically. I can see ... Read more »

Tron: Legacy

(2010)

These two films provide an excellent illustration of just how far CGI has come in twenty-eight years. Tron had only a few minutes of actual CGI. Tron 2 is wall-to-wall CGI. I think there are very few scenes that don’t have at least a little image manipulation, and most of them are very elaborate creations that exist only in the ... Read more »

Tron

(1982)

I was dubious when I popped the DVD into the Blu-ray, wondering what this would look like almost forty years later. I recall that I, like most people, was pretty impressed by the computer graphics. Tron was the first film to use much CGI, though only about twenty minutes of it. CGI was ridiculously slow and expensive, considering that the “super-computer” they ... Read more »

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