Movie Reviews
The Queen’s Gambit
I know two things about chess. (1) I know how each piece moves. (2) I know that I totally suck at it. Many years ago I walked right into a Fool’s Mate, and I haven’t touched a chess piece since. So believe me, you don’t even have to know (1) to enjoy this seven-part series from Netflix. It is not really about chess, it could have been a story about almost any sort of competition. ... Read more »
Alladin
Disney’s live action remakes have mostly been pretty good, defying my expectations. (Let’s just skip right over The Lion King.) This is one of the best. They’ve amped up the role of Jasmine, so she is a lot less passive. The production is eye-popping, and the music is great. Will Smith will never be able to replace Robin Williams as the Genie, but he does a ... Read more »
Aladdin
This may not be the absolute best of the decade-long Disney Renaissance (that would be either The Little Mermaid or {{Beauty and the Beast), but I think most people would agree that it’s the funniest. It barrels right along, full of action and song, for the first third, doing quite well, and then everything is amplified, ramped up a notch, and thrown into anarchy ... Read more »
Crazy Heart
All I knew was that it was about a washed-up, alcoholic country singer who once was pretty famous, and that Jeff Bridges won the Oscar. Uh … can anyone say Tender Mercies? I wasn’t really falling all over myself to see it. So I was pleasantly surprised when Robert Duvall showed up as one of Bad Blake’s old friends. I only wish he had been Mac Sledge, the role he ... Read more »
1917
Directors like to show off with long takes, as long as possible. The most extreme example in classics is Hitchcock’s Rope, which takes place in real time. Cameras in those days could only hold so much film, so Hitch had to use a few little tricks which are easy to spot. Much later was Russian Ark, a lovely 96-minute film which was a ... Read more »
Dr. No
Sean Connery, still the best Bond, died recently, and we have been watching his films. This is the one that started it all. Not just the twenty-seven films in the James Bond oeuvre, but a torrent of lesser spy movies in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I read all the Ian Fleming novels at one point in my life, and enjoyed them. This was not the first book, that was Casino ... Read more »
Bombshell
How’s this for a cast? Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, and Margot Robbie, with supporting work from Kate McKinnon and John Lithgow as that mega-asshole, Roger Ailes. (Theron and Robbie were nominated for Oscars.) Three blondes, in the story of how Ailes was brought down for sexual harassment during the 2016 presidential race, the one that gave us The Orange One, an asshole buddy of Ailes. ... Read more »
The Invisible Man
First, it has nothing at all to do with the H.G. Wells story or the Claude Rains 1933 classic movie other than it is about a man who can become invisible. Rather than some secret formula that drives him mad, he has a suit that re-directs light around his body, so he doesn’t need to run around naked in the snow. He is already mad, in the sense that he is a psychopath. He uses this suit to ... Read more »
Enola Holmes
I have enjoyed many of the seemingly endless variations on the classic character of Sherlock Holmes, from the British Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch, to the American Elementary, with Jonny Lee Miller, and Lucy Liu as Doctor Joan Watson, to films like The Seven Percent Solution and Mr. ... Read more »
Ed Wood
Tim Burton is an uneven director, in my opinion. I’ve liked about half of his movies, the other half, not so much. This is one of the good ones. It’s a surprisingly affectionate portrait of possibly the worst director ever to shout “Action” who ever worked in Hollywood. (My personal favorite bad director is the great Doris Wishman, who helmed Nude on the Moon and ... Read more »