![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
![]() Star power in service to dark humor makes Killing Them Softly an entertaining time at the movies, and will make it seem even more entertaining as an on-demand rental soon enough. This second movie that Brad Pitt has made with director Andrew Dominik is crisply constructed and often funny, wh…
WikChip Image
Pitt: star power in service to dark h...
|
||||||
![]() Part 1 of the The Hobbit trilogy is an oft charming visual feast. Wait. Part 1? Trilogy? The Hobbit ain’t no trilogy! It is now, at the movies. Peter Jackson – Lord High Creator of the Lord of the Rings trilogy…
WikChip Image
Bilbo's Hobbit-Hole
|
||||||
![]() I find self-loathing shmucks more annoying than interesting. So Barney’s Version – about a dissolute TV exec played by the redoubtable Paul Giamatti – surprised me by deepening into an affecting and intriguing drama in its third reel. Based on Mordecai Richler’s final novel, its literary pedig…
WikChip Video
Solid acting enlivens a solid novel
|
||||||
![]() Think of this de facto zombie movie as No Country for Little Boys: a surreally grim milieu through which a dauntless Father must shepherd his pure-hearted Son. Such a nihilistic extravaganza creates ample opportunities for life lessons of the most extreme sort. The result is gripping, though …
WikChip Image
Dauntless Paternal Love
|
||||||
![]() Perfect credits lead to a fitfully entertaining movie about some monumentally smug people in Heartburn. Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson – in his prime – lead the credits. The great Mike Nichols directs, fifteen years after directing Nicholson in the scandalous Carnal Knowledge…
WikChip Image
Jack in his prime
|
||||||
Noomi Rapace returns as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in this second movie of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy novels. A feminist Jason Bourne, her Lisbeth Salander operates with deadly derring do on-the-net, off-the-grid and in the grills of rapists. Wow. Even a red blooded dude like me…
WikChip Video
Fast moving, hard hitting, niftily pl...
|
||||||
![]() American remakes of foreign movies work best when they’re moved to America. Otherwise they can seem phony, which is the case with David Fincher’s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Fake Swedish accents are one hurdle. A kitschy feel is another. A merely OK Lizbeth Salander doesn’t h…
WikChip Image
Two great actors in a not great movie
|
||||||
![]() I read On The Road by 21 because it was necessary. I saw On The Road this weekend to be entertained. Entertaining it is, though cultural legacy aside, mad words about mad living don’t make a great movie, not without great acting and a cinematic story, neither of which On The Road has….
WikChip Image
Hand Check!
|
||||||
![]() A smug couple fights spectacularly over their narcissistic disappointments, with their immature worldview presented as the final word on family-centered suburban existence. Melodramatic, occasionally quite funny, flawlessly performed, supremely well made, Rev. Road is worth seeing if family tr…
WikChip Image
The classic novel behind the movie.
|
||||||
![]() Take a colorful cohort of old British retirees, send them to India where they’ve been promised an elegant and beautiful spot to retire, and then make lemonade from lemons. Best Exotic is a cute film, with an endearing quality that kept me (the most avid of action short-attention-span film love… |