Wilmington on Movies: 300: Rise of an Empire

It may be preposterous–hell, it is preposterous–but it’s never boring.

Wilmington on DVDs: Breathless; The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

A guy named Michel Poiccard steals a car, drives from Marseilles to Paris, ecstatically sings of a girl named Patricia (“Pa-Pa-Pa-Patricia!“), finds a gun, shoots and kills a cop on the road, tries to cash an uncashable check, stares at and mimics a Bogart still in front of a cinema, finds Patricia hawking New York Herald Tribunes on the street, goes to her room, bandies with her about love, art, philosophy and William Faulkner (“Between grief and nothing I will take grief“)…

Wilmington on Movies: Non-Stop

If you’d like to fly but you’re not in the mood for the aeronautical poetry of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, if that’s just too arty and ambitious for you, there’s another airplane movie around now that, compared to Miyazaki‘s, is so non-artsy, so action-packed, so super-clichéd and so mind-bogglingly illogical, that it‘s almost entertaining.

Wilmington on Movies: The Wind Rises

Miyazaki‘s The Wind Rises. A lovely name. A lovely film. A poem to flight, as soaring and lyrical as those of the sometimes heart-piercing French writer-artist-pilot Antoine de St. Exupery.

Wilmington on Movies: The Wolf of Wall Street

    THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (Four Stars) U.S.: Martin Scorsese, 2013   “An idea came to me. The thing to do was to skip the heroes and heroines, to write a movie containing only villains and bawds. I would not have to tell any lies then.” —Ben Hecht, describing the genesis of his…

Wilmington on Movies: Ride Along

    RIDE ALONG (Two Stars) U.S.: Tim Story (2014) Ride Along, which grossed over 40 million dollars in its opening  week,  is  a big, glossy, ultra-predictable  buddy cop movie in which costars Ice Cube (Boyz n the Hood) and Kevin Hart (Think Like a Man) and director Tim Story (Barbershop) pull a comedy variation,…

Wilmington on DVDs: A Christmas Carol (1951); It’s a Wonderful Life

It’s one of those movies that almost all moviegoers know, many love and a few (the unhappy few) pooh-pooh. But Capra‘s populist gem deserves its primal place in our Christmas memories. It‘s a stirring, exhilarating mix of Norman Rockwell and film noir.

Wilmington on Movies: Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Will Ferrell and Adam McKay created what became a classic movie character: the cheerfully narcissistic Ron Burgundy. a mirthfully-mustachioed would-be super-stud San Diego TV news anchor, whose ego and self-delusions were as immense as his (temporarily) high San Diego ratings (or, in Ron‘s slightly demented translation “Sawn Dee-ah-go“) and the erections he could never quite disguise.

Wimington on Movies — The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Books were my first love, movies my second. Yet, someday, I may get around to reading Suzanne Collins’ mega-selling young adult novel “Catching Fire,” for the moment the big-money blockbuster movie adapted from it—The Hunger Games: Catching Fire—will have to suffice.

Wilmington on Movies: The Counselor

Is The Counselor as bad as they say?

Wilmington on DVDs: House of Wax (1953); After Earth; The Purge

The Purge may be well-named. The movie‘s eventually almost non-stop brutality and terror have a kind of emetic effect, which is what happens in most of these pictures.

Wilmington on DVDs: Star Trek Into Darkness; The Hangover, Part III; The Hangover

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Wilmington on Movies: Lee Daniels’ The Butler

The Butler is a stretch, and a sentimental exaggeration of course.

Wilmington on DVDs: To the Wonder

To the Wonder is one of those pictures that either knocks you out or irritates you—or maybe does a little of both.

Wilmington on Movies: Planes

In movies, especially movies intended for kids, originality isn’t everything. Adults are sometimes another story.

Wilmington on DVDs: Tristana; Mamma Mia! The Movie; Trance

Tristana is a masterpiece, but it’s also a grimmer, sadder, more psychologically wounding film than Belle de Jour, which was regarded as a great art film turn-on of the 1960s, during the somewhat frenzied romps of Sexual Revolution. But, if audiences thrilled to the whorehouse fear, desire and wayward beauty of Belle de Jour, what were they to make of Tristana, in which the most memorable erotic encounter occurs when a one-legged woman exposes herself to the lustful deaf-mute son of her guardian-husband’s house servant?

Wilmington on Movies: The Wolverine

The Wolverine was directed by the almost bizarrely versatile James Mangold and the script is credited to a gifted threesome that includes Christopher McQuarrie, Mark Bomback and Scott Frank—and their show pours on the action and the production values. But it also ladles out the personality, and emotion that these kinds of movies often skimp on—and even throws in some humor. It’s a good show, full of zip and style—maybe not as good as I may be making it seem. But you can’t say this film doesn’t do what it’s meant to do, or that it doesn’t joyously exceed some of the usual parameters. Man of Steel, eat your heart out.

Wilmington on Movies: The To Do List

The movie is cute and so is Aubrey Plaza—though, with her pouty, sexy, full-lipped looks, I don’t know if she ‘s the right actress to play an all-time valedictorian, or a virgin. (An Ellen Page type might have been better.) On the other hand, if Plaza had played the bad sister Amber, she probably would have stolen the movie, as Bilson almost does.

Wilmington on DVDs: The File on Thelma Jordon; Adua and her Friends; Bullet to the Head

Recent birthday girl Barbara Stanwyck, one of the smartest and toughest of all the classic Hollywood femme fatales, was terrific at playing earthy babes who knew their way around a bedroom—and sometimes a courtroom or an insurance claims office as well,

Wilmington on DVDs: Band of Outsiders (Bande à part)

Avec

Pulp.

Poetry.

Politics (Peut-etre).

Two Guys, A Girl and a Gun.

Robbery

Murder