Movie Reviews
Titles starting with 0-9
10 Cloverfield Lane
This one somehow fell off my radar, probably because I thought it was some sort of sequel to that pretty awful “found footage” movie, Cloverfield. And it is …but only sort of. The producer and director insist it has elements of that movie, but I don’t see it. Cloverfield was a sprawling, incoherent, impenetrable mess, and this is a ... Read more »
10 Items or Less
We were so uninterested that after 30 minutes (or less) we abandoned the three items in our cart and didn’t even make it to the check-out line.
10 Rillington Place
10 Rillington Place (1971) A recreation of one of the most notorious crimes in Great Britain, the murders of eight (and maybe more) people by John Christie. The address is the house where he did his nasty deeds, and this movie was filmed at the actual location. Richard Attenborough is nicely creepy in the role of Christie.
10,000 Black Men Named George
George Pullman seems to have been a bit of a progressive, at least at first, for his day. (Never mind that Pullman strike nastiness in 1894.) The country was filled with ex-slaves with no jobs, so he decided to hire Negroes, and only Negroes, as porters on his Pullman cars. ... Read more »
101 Dalmatians
I admit I was dubious, and with good reason. Re-makes are a bad idea more than 90% of the time. And remaking a classic animated film as live action? I went in expecting to dislike it, and I ended up enjoying it quite a lot. Glenn Close did a wonderful job of portraying my love, Read more »
11:14
Here’s a little indie gem that’s developing a cult following. If you like weird, anything-can-happen movies like After Hours or Into the Night or Miracle Mile, films that don’t go where you expect, you will like this. Also, if you like fractured time lines, telling a story from the end back ... Read more »
12
This is billed as the Russian version of 12 Angry Men I’d rather describe it as “inspired by,” as there are significant differences, not all of them made necessary by transplanting the story into a different culture. The biggest difference is that in the original, we never saw the defendant. Here, we constantly flash back to scenes of the boy’s life. ... Read more »
12 Angry Men
It’s hard to imagine a stagier movie (and I mean that in the very best sense) than this one-set, twelve-character offering from Sidney Lumet. And indeed the script was adapted by Reginald Rose from his teleplay for Studio One on CBS in 1954. Live television! Very primitive equipment. All twelve performances are terrific, anchored by the only marquee star, Henry ... Read more »
12 Years a Slave
Now I’ve finally seen the winner of Best Picture of 2013, and I have to say I was only slightly impressed. I knew it was going to be an ordeal to watch it, and I was right. The torture, the humiliation, the degradation, all come with the territory of movies about slavery. Which is not to say they shouldn’t be made, not by any means. But … and I hope I don’t get in trouble for saying this … ... Read more »
12:08 East of Bucharest
December 22, 1989, at 12:08 PM was the exact moment that murdering Romanian fuck Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife fled Bucharest, just a wee bit too late to save their asses. (They were executed by firing squad three days later. What a great Christmas present for the Romanian people!) Now its 16 years later, and a ... Read more »