Wilmington By Mike WilmingtonWilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington On Movies: Paterson
A confession. I love Jarmusch’s movies — or most of them anyway, because, like Jerry Seinfeld‘s TV show, they’re so resolutely and unblushingly about nothing or nothing much, or, to be succinct, about the poetry of nothing.
Read the full article »Wilmington On Movies: DOCTOR STRANGE
I might prefer something adapted not from a classic comic but, say, a great novel, or a profound drama or a truly witty comedy, but we don’t call the shots.
Read the full article »Wilmington On Movies: Inferno, The Girl On The Train
Inferno, the third in Ron Howard and Tom Hanks’ series of Dan Brown-derived high-end action movies, aspires to classy trash. At least it tries — mashing references to the works of the great classical Italian poet Dante Alighieri (“The Divine Comedy”) with the not-so-great works of the financially astute airport bestsellermeister Brown (The Da Vinci Code), amid imagery that suggests a nightmare attraction on the National Geographic Channel.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVD: Everybody Wants Some!!
Youth is wasted on the young. Maybe. But it definitely wasn‘t squandered on Richard Linklater, that wondrously humane American filmmaker (Austin, Texas-raised auteur of the “Before” Trilogy and Boyhood), who, in his best work, uses his own youth to potently amuse us and brilliantly illuminate the worlds we share.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Purge: Election Year
Back in the 1970s, when the paradigms for shows like this were being set down — by Roger Corman and other ballsy independent producers — this kind of picture would have been a low- budget job, and it probably would have been better for it. If they were going to spend more money on The Purge: Election Year, they might at least have played around more with the idea of an entire nation plunged into chaos.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Film: Our Kind of Traitor
Obviously, they both have superb literary taste, at least in their choice of projects. But Traitor isn’t the kind of success that seems within reach, that might have been. Some of the actors (like the otherwise admirable Lewis) seem younger than they should be. The hooks don’t grip us, and the ending doesn’t wipe you out the way it should. But you can’t have everything, as Perry Makepeace learns
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The BFG
Trust the tale and not the teller. Or trust the tittletattler. Maybe that’s why Spielberg and his collaborators gave his BFG the face of a Jewish angel, and cast Mark Rylance to play him. Delumptiously.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Shallows
The Shallows is a genuinely scary movie thriller that spooks you because, in a way, it seems so real — this tense, taut movie manage to get by without ghosts, monsters, supernatural maniacs or The Devil, indeed without almost anything that absolutely couldn’t happen (maybe) in the real world. Like Jaws, it’s the white-knuckle, full-throttle story of a battle between human vs. shark: a visually voluptuous thriller, set in a mostly deserted stretch of Australian coast, about a great white shark that traps a young surfer and medical student on an ocean-bound rock and buoy only about 200 yards from shore — a deserted beach near an ocean that is mostly empty except for that trapped girl and that toothy shark and one other creature we‘ll introduce later. (You’ll like him.)
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Central Intelligence
Central Intelligence surprises you — or surprised me, at any rate.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Genius
Thomas Wolfe was an American literary phenomenon: a North Carolina-born novelist and prodigy who hoped to write books of Shakespearean verbal grandeur, of Tolstoyan dramatic scope and Dickensian humanity, and to live a life to fit those vast ambitions. He’s also an artist who tends to be ignored or underrated these days. A pity, because whenever you read one of his huge novels (especially “Look Homeward Angel” and “Of Time and the River”), his talent and his mixed but munificent literary gifts flame right off the page at you.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Conjuring 2
People who like scary ghost horror movies, from Frankenstein to The Haunting, probably are partial, at least a little, to that awesome, icky sensation of being plunged into sucking swamps of cinematic dread, then rescued (maybe spuriously, maybe not) at the very last possible millisecond—a sensation you may feel quite a few times in The Conjuring 2.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Alice Through the Looking Glass
This new movie’s flaws seem to me less ruinous, its strengths less negligible, and its effect more enjoyable than naysayers have allowed. That doesn’t mean that you should rush out and see it, simply that the people involved did a better job than they have been credited.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Forbidden Games
Forbidden Gamesis one of the great black-and-white French films of the post-war, pre-New Wave cinema era. But it‘s also one of a group of initially admired French post-war films that were later radically underrated by the New Wave critic-directors, including Truffaut and Godard.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Sinister 2; Sinister
Sinister 2, one of the creepier horror movies I’ve seen recently, is an attempt to make an even more sinister sequel to the 2012 horror-sleeper. That earlier Sinister was a found-footage horror show that scared some audiences and grossed some dough back in 2012, and also inspired a lukewarm, semi-horrified response from, as Orson Welles was wont to say, your obedient servant. But this new Sinister is, like many mediocre and derivative gorefests so unengagingly gory and so unentertainingly sicko that it seems extremely unlikely that we’ll ever see a “Sinister 3.” For which we should all be grateful.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Third Man
There’s nothing wrong with The Third Man even if the world it describes is wrong to the core and bad to the bone.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Jurassic World
Ever since Jaws made his name and fortune in 1975 Steven Spielberg has been the king of the summer movie, and his production of this weekend’s nearly-record-breaking mega-hit Jurassic World simply continues that tradition. Where would we be if we didn’t have a shark, a dinosaur, a U.F.O., or an E. T. to run from or play with or queue up for? Even when his movies aren’t released in summer, they can feel like summery treats.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: San Andreas
That famous Fault we Angelenos dread cracks apart and sends much of Los Angeles and San Francisco crashing down into the streets, the freeways, and the ocean and tsunamis rise and skyscrapers topple…
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Entourage
I never caught any of TV’s “Entourage” — the hit Hollywood-set comedy-satire about a movie star from Queens and the three hometown buddies who get dragged along (like Elvis’ Memphis Mafia) in the wake of his rise to fame and riches. But it always struck me, from its rep and reviews, as a show I might enjoy, just as the movie that‘s now been inspired by that TV series, struck me as something that might hand me a laugh or two (or even three). Which just goes to show how gullible I can be.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Apu Trilogy
The film, as much as any that I’ve seen in decades of watching movies, becomes an overwhelming experience. It stays with you, always: a work of art in the same vein and genre and of the same high quality as John Ford’s Depression America masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath and Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist Italian classic Bicycle Thieves (both among Ray‘s inspirations for his own films). In some ways, it is superior to either of them.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Poltergeist / When Marnie Was There
One thing you can say in favor of the latest Poltergeist is that at least nobody in it gets tortured, hideously maimed, eviscerated, eaten, or chopped to screaming bits. Children may take their parents to this picture, without fear of nightmares.
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