Movie Reviews
Titles starting with R
Ricki and the Flash
Four Oscar winners right up front. Written by Diablo Cody, directed by Jonathan Demme, co-starring Kevin Kline. And of course starring the incredible Meryl Streep. She is a rock singer who abandoned her family a long time ago to follow her dream. She had one album that went nowhere, and now fronts a group of oldies but goodies in a medium-sized dive in Tarzana, where they have been the ... Read more »
Ride the High Country
Sam Peckinpah’s second movie, and Randolph Scott’s last. It is also Mariette Hartley’s first movie and near the end of Joel McCrea’s career. In addition there are Peckinpah regulars L.Q. Jones and Warren Oates, as well as Edgar Buchanan (Judge Roy Bean). Sam Peckinpah revolutionized the western movie in the 1960s, and this one shows a lot of his trademarks, with over-the-hill heroes, moral ... Read more »
Rififi
This is a bona fide masterpiece. It would probably be on my Top 100 if I made one. Blacklisted director Jules Dassin (who appears here as the Italian safecracker) hadn’t worked in 5 years, and took this job for the money. Then he took a novel which François Truffaut describes as the worst noir book he ever read and turned it into one of the best noir films ever made. It is the ... Read more »
The Right Stuff
For a while I was wondering if I was destined to never see this film. I went to a theater in Eugene, Oregon, on opening day, and settled down with my popcorn and prepared to be stunned. And we got to Chuck Yeager riding his horse past the X-1 sitting out on the desert, testing the engines. (Never happened. Like much in this film, the scene was meant to be symbolic of many things.) And the ... Read more »
Righteous Kill
This movie has a surprise ending, so I really can’t say too much about it. I began to suspect something about halfway through, but Lee said it fooled her, and I’ll admit I didn’t guess correctly what the surprise would be. That’s enough about that. The attraction of this otherwise fairly standard cop story would be the idea of De Niro and Pacino working together. All those Oscar wins and ... Read more »
The Ring
Is it written somewhere that a director has to make a film about boxing? So many of them have. Back in 1927 the so-called “sweet science” was a different sort of thing than it is now. It seems that everyone was interested in it, from the lower classes with brawls held in toilets, through the middle class, right up to the hoity-toity seated at ringside. Today boxing still exists, and at the ... Read more »
Rio Bravo
This is so much like El Dorado, a subsequent film by Howard Hawks, that it can be hard to tell them apart. John Wayne is the sheriff, Ricky Nelson is the young gun who joins him, and Dean Martin is his old friend, a drunk. The problem is that these parts were played by James Caan and Robert Mitchum in the first one, and let’s face it, Ricky Nelson is no James ... Read more »
Ripley’s Game
We liked The Talented Mister Ripley, with Matt Damon, but this one is even better, starring John Malkovich as an older version of the amoral fellow. For some strange reason this went straight to video. I intend to read the novels soon.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
My oh my, have we ever come a long way from Roddy McDowell in a monkey suit. I think most people, like me, enjoyed Planet of the Apes in 1968. It was a lot better made than most SF of the time. Then came the sequels (Beneath the, Escape from, Conquest of, Battle for) the ones I saw being pretty awful. Tim Burton did a remake which I ... Read more »
Risky Business
That old myth of the whore with the heart of gold is a durable one. Maybe because men like to believe they have the power to turn these woman away from a life of crime and degradation? I dunno, but just look at it. There was Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke. (Okay, she was a madam, since she owned the Long Branch, but you don’t get to be a madam without working your way ... Read more »