Movie Reviews
Titles starting with M
The Man With Two Brains
Watching this, I found myself musing about three funny men who having been making movies for a long time: Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, and Woody Allen. All three of them made films of inspired lunacy early on. Woody soon moved to gentler, human comedy and pure drama. Mel stayed true to his muse, such as she was, but after making seven movies that ranged from brilliant to damn good, followed ... Read more »
The Man Without a Past
Quirky film from Finland’s most respected director. A man is robbed and beaten and loses his memory. Hollywood would have made a hash of this, but the new-born innocent falls in with a series of quirky characters, and I had a lot of wry laughs.
Manchester by the Sea
Casey Affleck is a janitor in Boston when he learns that his brother has died of heart failure. It’s not a surprise because they knew he had a bad heart, and he takes it reasonably well. In Manchester he learns that his brother has left him in charge of his modest estate, and the guardianship of his 15-year-old son. This is all news to him, and he wants no part of it. It’s clear that he ... Read more »
The Manchurian Candidate
Jonathan Demme is remaking this with Denzel Washington as Frank Sinatra, Meryl Streep as Angela Lansbury, and someone called Liev Schreiber as Laurence Harvey. Why do they do these things? Streep is very, very good, but Lansbury had one of the single greatest scenes in cinema history in the original; not even Meryl is going to be able to top it. The Manchurian ... Read more »
The Manchurian Candidate
It is now the third day of the Republican National Clusterfuck. Again, no one has been killed, unlike the action that went down in Richard Condon’s fictitious convention of 1956, which saw the assassination of Senator John Iselin and his horrible wife by her brainwashed son. (Or as the jolly Chinese Communist monster Yen Lo put it, “dry-cleaned.”) There are Republicans who are actually ... Read more »
Mandela and de Klerk
I am writing this one day after the death of Nelson Mandela, and the whole world is in mourning. Every living U.S. president (except George H.W., whose health is not so good) is going to the funeral, and probably most of the other leaders of the world. Flags are flying at half mast, something I can’t recall seeing for any other non-American. Senators and Congresspersons who voted against ... Read more »
Mandela and de Klerk
I am writing this one day after the death of Nelson Mandela, and the whole world is in mourning. Every living U.S. president (except George H.W., whose health is not so good) is going to the funeral, and probably most of the other leaders of the world. Flags are flying at half mast, something I can’t recall seeing for any other non-American. Senators and Congresspersons who voted against ... Read more »
Manhattan
I think I love Manhattan as much as Woody Allen does. Maybe more, because I’ve never lived there, never had a chance to grow even a little bit accustomed to it. Every trip to Manhattan (the Bronx, and Staten Island, too!) is a magical moment for me. So when this love poem to Manhattan began unreeling on the screen for the first time in glorious black and white to the sounds of one of my ... Read more »
Manhattan Murder Mystery
Sometimes a movie just rubs me the wrong way. Woody Allen was going for a “Nick and Nora” sort of story, with a little Rear Window added in. Woody and his wife, Diane Keaton, live in an apartment next door to a much older couple. They don’t know them well, having been in their apartment only once, where Woody was bored out of his mind with the man’s stamp ... Read more »
Manhunter
Terrific filming of the extremely weird Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. A very good portrait of Hannibal Lector by Brian Cox, considering how little screen time he has.