A

I saw this animated short in film history class at Michigan State in about 1966. A writer is tormented by a giant letter A. After battling it in various ingenious ways for 10 minutes, he defeats it. Then a giant B appears. Cute.

The Internet Movie Database lists movies with the titles Read more »

The A.B.C. Murders

If I were casting Agatha Christie’s book The A.B.C Murders one of the last people on my list of possibilities to play the famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, would be John Malkovich. Poirot has been played by a fairly wide range of people, but Malkovich is almost totally against the short, obsessive-compulsive dandy described in the books.

But it ... Read more »

Absolut Warhola

A few German filmmakers go to Andy Warhol’s ancestral home in Ruthenia, which is a part of Slovenia close to Ukraine. Warhol is the local boy who made good. Everybody knows of him, or is part of his family, though they only learned of him in 1987; decadent western art, I guess. The government has built a museum to Warhol in ... Read more »

Absolutely Anything

It sounds like a good idea at first. A council of alien beings (voiced by all the surviving members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus), decide to grant a random human the power to do absolutely anything. Simon Pegg is chosen, and we quickly are reminded that one should be careful what one wishes for, as you might just get it. Every wish has a downside and needs to ... Read more »

The Abyss (Special Edition)

I saw a documentary of the making of this movie, and I was enough to give me the willies. There was more underwater shooting than in any previous movie, and it was dangerous, tedious (as all movie-making is, but this was more), and most of all, uncomfortable. Much of it was shot in a gigantic tank that was deep enough that some decompression time was needed if you were going to come out, ... Read more »

The Accountant

Boy, there’s a title that makes you want to run right out and see it, right? I mean, whose life is more exciting than a CPA? But no, really, how do you make an accountant’s life interesting? By thinking up a highly unlikely plot device … but I have to admit, an interesting one.

Ben Affleck is the title character. He is on the autistic spectrum, what is known as a high-functioning ... Read more »

The Accused

Jodie Foster has been acting since she was three, in Mayberry, R.F.D. She had her breakout roles in two Scorsese films: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Taxi Driver, for which she won an Academy Award nomination. Then (and I hadn’t remembered this part) her career more or less tanked. She enrolled at Yale ... Read more »

Ace in the Hole

Billy Wilder co-wrote and directed this examination of press excesses when confronted by the “big story.” The media circuses we see these days are of course a lot higher tech, and assemble faster, but don’t think they’re anything new. There have been things like the Read more »

Across the Pacific

John Huston brought the trio of Bogey, Mary Astor, and Sidney Greenstreet back a year after The Maltese Falcon for this rather cobbled-together story of the last weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In fact, the original script dealt with Bogey discovering that the attack was going to happen … but reality trumped fiction, and when the Japs bombed us they ... Read more »

Across the Universe

You don’t so much watch this movie as you drop it, like a tab of Owsley‘s Finest Acid back in the ‘60s. Roger Ebert said in his ... Read more »