Movie Reviews
Titles starting with S
The Secret Lives of Dentists
A low-key, wonderfully acted small movie about a family in crisis because the husband suspects his wife of infidelity. I enjoyed it a lot.
The Secret World of Arrietty
The Borrowers was a series of children’s books by Mary Norton, the first one coming out in 1952. It was about tiny people living in normal people’s houses and “borrowing” stuff to use as furniture, to eat, etc. Since, as far as I can determine, they never put anything back, the most appropriate title might have been The Thieves, but I ... Read more »
Secretariat
It’s not easy to make a movie whose outcome you know. It can be done: The Day of the Jackal (the first one, not the moronic remake) comes to mind. You know De Gaulle survives, but still you are fascinated and tense. This movie succeeds in that, too. You don’t need to be a sports fan or a follower of horse racing (I am neither). The fact is, if you don’t know the ... Read more »
See No Evil
Blind lady in peril. Audrey Hepburn did the same sort of thing four years earlier in Wait Until Dark, which was based on a stage play. That one worked even better than this one (though this one is quite good) because of the real menace generated by Alan Arkin as the bad guy. We get to know who he is fairly early on in the movie.
This one takes an opposite tack. We don’t discover ... Read more »
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor made four films together. They weren’t exactly Hope and Crosby on the road, but they were a good comedy team … for two movies: Silver Streak and Stir Crazy. (Blazing Saddles doesn’t count; they had no scenes together.) This one was the third. It’s pretty bad. I haven’t seen the ... Read more »
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
Here’s a good idea that never quite comes off. Parts of it are funny, and the whole thing is thought-provoking, but it’s hard to skate a line between comedy and pathos, and this one veers around a lot.
We’ve seen a million films about things after an apocalyptic event, and quite a few about an approaching apocalypse. It is always either averted (Read more »
Selma
When I think of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., I’m always a bit sad. I mean, he was far from the first basically good man, and far from the first one in the public eye, who let his cock get the better of him. It’s a powerful impulse, sex, and has led to a great deal of human folly. (On my part, too; I have sometimes been no better than I should be.) But it strikes me that seldom ... Read more »
Separate But Equal
You can’t really dislike a movie like this. It is so earnest and so well-intentioned, and the story is an important and fascinating one. But you can’t really like it much, either, because making a movie about real history without overhyping it too much with false events (as in the execrable Mississippi Burning, on much the same subject) so often means ... Read more »
A Separate Peace
I’ve never read the novel this is based on. It was made once before, in 1972. This is a 90-minute version for Showtime, by Peter Yates (Bullitt, Breaking Away). It’s well-acted, and it’s a good story, but it has a sort of condensed feel to it. It could have been at least an hour longer, I wouldn’t have minded spending more time with ... Read more »