Movie Reviews

The Chalk Garden

(USA, UK, 1964)

This one strikes me as a lot of angst over not much. Deborah Kerr finds work as a governess at a country mansion. Hayley Mills is the disturbed and thoroughly unlikable (to me, anyway) teenage brat who is setting fire to things. Kerr has a dark secret, which seemed pretty plain to me from the very beginning. Hayley’s father, John Mills, plays the butler, and the great Dame Edith Evans is ... Read more »

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

(1941)

This is no less than the tenth film version of the classic Robert Louis Stevenson novella. But the only predecessors that really count are one in 1920 starring John Barrymore, and one in 1931 starring Frederic March. March won the fifth Best Actor Oscar, in a tie with Wallace Beery. I would like to see that one, for several reasons. The famous transformation scenes were done so cleverly ... Read more »

I Smile Back

(2015)

Sarah Silverman is one of the funniest people on Planet Earth. I don’t know what planet she calls home, but when she visits us she graces us with her extremely weird brand of humor. Now she has decided to branch out into serious drama, and for her debut she has picked one of the most depressing scripts of the year.

Laney is outwardly doing pretty well, with a huge ... Read more »

The Third Man

(1949)

SPOILERS. To my astonishment, about fifteen minutes into this movie I realized that I had never seen it before. I’ve been a film buff since I was twelve, and somehow I had not seen one of the all-time classic movies. And what’s even stranger, I had been sure that I had seen it. What I’ve realized is that I’ve seen certain scenes from The Third ... Read more »

High Crimes

(2002)

Ashley Judd, a defense attorney, finds out the man she has been married to for over a decade is an ex-marine wanted for mass murder in El Salvador. It is a pretty rude awakening, considering the first she hears of it is when they are arrested in a big take-down by FBI storm troopers. He claims he didn’t do it. She decides to defend him.

But she doesn’t know much about the court ... Read more »

A Perfect Murder

(1998)

Up until about the halfway point, this is a remake of Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder. I’ve never really understood the impulse to do a movie over, except possibly when the original was in another language, and even that is suspect. The great majority of the time, the new version is inferior to the old, often vastly so. But this is one of the better ones. If you ... Read more »

Tootsie

(1982)

One thing I didn’t notice when this was new was how until Michael shows up for work as Dorothy, no woman has the courage (might one say balls?) to call out a man for treating her like shit, for objectifying her. It takes a man to do that. I don’t have any political point to make about this. It was still fairly early in the modern feminist movement, and I wonder ... Read more »

Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words

(2016)

I could probably come up with the names of several dozen artists who have hugely influenced popular music (which I define as anything outside of classical), going all the way back to Scott Joplin. But there are only a handful who have been flat-out experimental, and most of them were strictly in jazz, cats like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Other than those, ... Read more »

When Harry Met Sally …

(1989)

Have you ever been to a restaurant where one person takes about half an hour to order? Someone who questions each ingredient in each menu item, wanting to know if it was cage-free, free-range, gluten-free, mercury-free, organic, and all the spices it will be cooked with? Then tells the waited to eliminate half those spices? Who wants three references from the waiter to be sure he or she is ... Read more »

Demolition