Movie Reviews
Night Will Fall
An extremely odd movie here. When the Russians and the Americans and the British began rolling over Germany and Poland and exposing the heretofore unimaginable horrors of the death camps, they were accompanied by combat photographers. Even the raw footage, which you have certainly seen, and which has been incorporated into any number of previous documentaries, is enough to make you puke. ... Read more »
The Bletchly Circle (Second season)
Once more we join the bored-to-tears female geniuses from Bletchley Park as they set out to solve mysteries. This is such an appealing group, and as you watch them you can’t help lament the sheer waste of talent for the thousands of years before the women’s liberation movement suddenly opened up almost infinite career paths for women. In 1953, though, it was ... Read more »
Bonjour Tristesse
Otto Preminger directed this study of rich people with too much time in their hands. Party, party, party! Dance the night away! Take a break and visit the casino! It is all too, too frantic, and there wasn’t a single person I gave a damn about. The title means, sort of, “Hello Sadness,” and Jean Seberg narrates it, letting us know ahead of time that this madcap whirl is going to end in ... Read more »
Particle Fever
Back in high school, when I was learning what little I know about particle physics (most of it probably wrong now, there were illustrations of what had happened at the business end of atom smashers, as we called them then. It was a burst of lines and curves, very pretty. And the experimenters could point at a short line and say, with confidence, “There! That is the track of a mu meson! It ... Read more »
Pitch Perfect 2
It is axiomatic that a movie with a 2, or a 3, or a 7 (Furious 7, oh, the horror, the horror!) is highly unlikely to be as good as the first one was. There are exceptions, but not many. This is a case in point. As I watched this loud, overblown, over-produced cookie I kept trying to put my finger on what went wrong. It boiled down to that sweet little ditty, “The ... Read more »
Haunter
I watched this on the strength of the star, Abigail Breslin, who I have admired since her knock-out performance as Olive in Little Miss Sunshine. She has since been good in other movies, too, most notably Zombieland. She is an adult now, albeit a pretty young one, and navigating the perilous straits between being a child actress and a ... Read more »
Tomorrowland
Sometimes a movie has monster hit written all over it, and it lays an egg. There’s no way of forecasting this; it seems the buzz was that this was a solid story, starring George Clooney, and it looked great. What could possibly go wrong? Well, as William Goldman famously said in his phenomenal book Adventures in the Screen Trade, “Nobody knows ... Read more »
Run All Night
Here we have another mob story starring everyone’s favorite geriatric action hero, Liam Neeson. I have to say, he’s damn good at it, making even a dreary re-tread like Taken 3 at least watchable when he’s on-screen. This time he’s an over-the-hill hit man for Ed Harris’s gang. He and Ed were close, and Ed doesn’t have the heart to send him to the old hit man’s ... Read more »
Inside Out
Pixar has its mojo back! After a string of three sequels and Brave, all of which were okay films, none of which really measured up to the studio’s high standards, we now have one that showcases their strengths. Simply put: soaring imagination and a story that will touch your heart. It is not quite to up the level of Up and Read more »
Furious 7
First, for the first hour I was pretty much at sea as a host of characters was introduced who meant nothing to me. I may have seen the original Fast and Furious (I just don’t recall), but I didn’t see two through six, and there seems to have been a ton of back story. Marriages, deaths, a woman who has lost her memory. It’s like trying to watch the fifth Read more »