Movie Reviews
Titles starting with K
Knockaround Guys
An overlooked gem. Lowlife gangsters, most of them dumb as dirt, try to recover some money in a small town in Montana. Vin Diesel and Tom Noonan are very good.
Knocked Up
Judd Apatow was the writer/director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which I thought was dandy, and this one is, too. There are no plot surprises, it goes pretty much as you would expect it to go, but the way it gets there is all the charm. Apatow seems to like nerds—we heard him interviewed on NPR and he seems a bit of a nerd himself—and he likes the nerd to get the ... Read more »
Knowing
I can’t review this one without some spoilers, including the ending, so be warned. It is full of ups and down. It begins well enough in 1959 when an elementary school is burying a time capsule. It’s going to be filled with drawings the kids did, imagining the future fifty years hence. One strange little girl is writing a long list of numbers instead of drawing a picture. So far, so ... Read more »
Kolya
Louka is a cellist who, because of an ill-advised political statement, has been reduced to playing dirges in the balcony at funerals, before the coffin is rolled into the crematorium. These were the days before the Velvet Revolution, when the Soviets were still in control of Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries.
He is persuaded into a sham marriage with a Russian ... Read more »
Kon-Tiki
Thor Heyerdahl was an idiot. A brave and intrepid adventurer, sure. Charismatic, handsome, an original thinker, no question. Norwegian, don’t you know. But what kind of nut would you have to be to build a raft out of balsa logs and try to sail it from Peru to Polynesia when you can’t swim (like me) and have a phobia of being underwater (also like me)? Sure, he wanted to do this to prove ... Read more »
Kong: Skull Island
Exploring new frontiers in how stupid an action movie can be! Will somebody please tell filmmakers to leave that poor monkey dead at the base of the Empire State Building? It’s getting ridiculous. This one is big enough to eat a helicopter. I cared about these characters about as much as I cared about the ... Read more »
Kontroll
Odd little film. It’s filmed entirely in the subway system of Budapest, and begins with a stiff guy reading a disclaimer on a clipboard, saying he had been criticized for allowing the filming to go on because it didn’t reflect well on transit workers. Who is this guy? Is it a put-on? Maybe Jodie Foster could have had a flight attendant deliver a similar statement before Read more »
Koyaanisqatsi
The Hopi word for “Life out of balance.” The first of a mini-genre that has no plot, no dialogue, nothing but images that wash over you like a hurricane. It has music by Philip Glass, which fits it perfectly. Much of it is stop-action scenes of nature and cities. I suppose it has a message about the destruction of the environment, but I prefer to see it as pure eye candy. See ... Read more »
Kubo and the Two Strings
People keep writing the obituary for stop-motion animation, and then something like this comes along. It was produced by Laika, the successor to Will Vinton Studios, probably best known for the claymation commercials for California raisins and the song “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” They did a lot of other stuff, of course.
Technically it is stunning. Two things made it better ... Read more »
Kwaidan
(The title means, literally, ghost story.) Lafcadio Hearn was a strange sort of fellow. After a writing career in Ireland, Cincinnati, and New Orleans, he was sent to Japan in 1890 and fell in love with the place. He married a woman from a samurai family, became a naturalized citizen, and changed his name to Koizumi Setsu. Then he started writing articles and stories that helped introduced ... Read more »