![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
![]() Morning TV seduces Rachel McAdams’ plucky heroine more than a McDreamy boyfriend in this love letter to the bright lights of mainstream media. Good thing, since some well crafted career comedy makes Morning Glory reasonably entertaining to men, even if its target audience is aspiring women loo…
WikChip Image
Harrison Ford: gravitas on demand.
|
||||||
Everybody’s damaged in Please Give. Most are awful, some sweet, all adrift. Misanthropic, it generates frequent laughs at the expense of these modern Manhattanites. Think a more seriously inclined Seinfeld – from the feminine side. Not that …
WikChip Image
Big sis Amanda Peet: Skin deep beauty
|
||||||
![]() The NY Times’ take on the banking crisis endgame gets reenacted in this made-for-HBO docudrama. Notwithstanding the Big Lie told in the middle, the movie otherwise seems to competently essay the mechanics of the fall of Lehman Brothers, AIG and the imposition of TARP. The Big Lie comes when t…
WikChip Image
Tim Geithner: Mr. Too-Big-To-Fail him...
|
||||||
![]() It’s a romantic thriller. No wait, it’s a lame sorta scifi story that never really adds up. Pity, because the strong cast works well, with romantic leads Matt Damon and Emily Blunt demonstrating real chemistry. How does a misfire like The Adjustment Bureau get made? You can just see the…
|
||||||
![]() Not especially funny or thrilling, Tower Heist does offer a proven cast of name actors and a topical story. In fairness, I viewed it on an airliner seatback screen. While seeing it in the theater is no longer an option, viewing it on a big flatscreen in a home theater may have stimulated a hi…
WikChip Image
More Murphy please, at least in this ...
|
||||||
![]() A designer drug leads to designer suits, a designer lifestyle, an inevitable come-down, and then mystery. Is that limitless? Perhaps, though the title Limitless is harder to get your mind around than the actual movie. A classic story of ambition unfairly achieved – sheathed in pharmaceutic…
WikChip Image
Old Star & New Star: De Niro & Cooper
|
||||||
![]() The “Jewish Mark Twain” reanimates in this engaging and illuminating biography. Why the Yiddish Twain? Because the two contemporaries were known by pen names and pioneered writing about regular people in vernacular language. However, only Sholem Aleichem has a huge musical hit to his name. …
WikChip Image
Biggest Funeral in NYC History
|
||||||
![]() Lots of pretty people delivering razor sharp comedy atop an idiotic premise makes for a very good movie. The central conceit of Our Idiot Brother – Paul Rudd’s absurdly guileless fool, a.k.a. the Idiot Brother – gets just this side of tedious however. Fortunately the whole thing is more than a…
WikChip Image
Elizabeth Banks: Uptown Gorgeous
|
||||||
![]() Wall Street gets stripped bare in this brilliantly depressing takedown of überleveraged trading houses, what used to be known as Investment Banks. An acting tour de force about the fall of a Lehman-like firm, Margin Call plays like a Wall Street Glengarry Glen Ross…
WikChip Image
Stanley Tucci's dissed risk manager
|
||||||
![]() Anyone who’s dealt with an elderly parent will be charmed by Robot & Frank, a gentle and deft SciFi comedy. Perhaps the best Alzheimer’s movie yet, though the A Word is never mentioned, it carries an emotional kick that leavens it in the end, elevating it to more than just a lark. The gre…
WikChip Image
Teaching a robot to pick a lock
|