Tender Comrade

A wartime drama starring Ginger Rogers and Robert Ryan. Four war-widow Rosie the Riveters share a house while working at the Douglas Aircraft factory. The movie is a morale-builder, with several embarrassing speeches by some of the girls. Much of it is told in flashbacks to Ginger and Robert’s marriage before he was drafted and shipped out, showing how things look a lot different in ... Read more »

Tender Mercies

I’d forgotten how good this was. One of the better original screenplays ever written, by Horton Foote, who adapted To Kill a Mockingbird. Robert Duvall deserved his Oscar. He did his own singing—and he’s pretty good at it!—and wrote two of the songs. This is a Texas movie. Most of the people in it are not talkative, but they make every word count, and so does the ... Read more »

Tenderness

At the age of sixteen, a boy kills both his parents. But he is tried as a juvenile, and when he turns eighteen he is released. Russell Crowe is a cop who is convinced the kid wasn’t temporarily insane, he’s a born psychopath, and he sets out to get the kid. It sounds interesting, but I’m afraid it’s not. At a little more than the halfway point I was getting bored, so I looked up the plot ... Read more »

Tension

We open with Barry Sullivan looking right at the camera and talking about tension. He’s got that cynical, noir cop smirk that says he’s seen it all, and very little of it has fooled him. He’s stretching and releasing a thick rubber band, and talking about how, when looking at a suspect, he increases the tension. Slowly, slowly, until it becomes unbearable and the palooka or dame breaks ... Read more »

The Terminal

A good, solid piece of what they used to call Capracorn. A decent man is trapped in a no-win situation, makes the best of it, is rescued by the friends he has made along the way. Tom Hanks is as good as he always is.

I almost wish I hadn’t known that the vast terminal of the story was actually one of the larger movie sets ever built. That meant that, because I’m fascinated by the ... Read more »

Terminator Genisys

(NOTE: I was recently hospitalized for four days. So I did what I did the last time I was there: I watched movies from the small selection they offered. This was an opportunity to take in some that I normally would have passed on. And just as last time, I found they were all movies I was wise to have skipped. At least they didn’t make me any sicker. This is one.)

They hardly ever ... Read more »

Terminator Salvation

Oh, McG! You horrible piece of crap, McG! What have you done? What have you done to my beloved Terminator series? First you shortened your name from Joseph McGinty Nichol to that ridiculous moniker you’re using now, which might almost be forgivable, considering the one you were born with. Then you directed Charlie’s ... Read more »

Terms of Endearment

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 »

Terribly Happy

I always tend to think of Scandinavian countries as liberal, liberated, clean and orderly without being Germanic, full of happy and attractive fair-haired people. Stieg Larsson disabused me of that picture in Sweden, and now Henrik Ruben Genz has shattered my illusions about Denmark. Actually, I really knew better if I thought about it. The fact is that all countries apparently have their ... Read more »

The Terrorist

The “Cause” (unspecified; just a generic Cause) needs to assassinate an important politician in (some generic third-world country). The Fearless Leader can’t be bothered with sneaking up on the sonuvabitch and shooting him himself, so it is decided that a foot soldier should deliver a suicide bomb. Five young women are eager for the job. They are between 17 and 20, and each of them has ... Read more »