Reviews Archive for September, 2010
The DVD Wrap: Get Him to the Greek, Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, The Thin Red Line, The Law, Ellery Queen … and more
Get Him to the Greek: Blu-ray In Richard Benjamin’s delightful 1982 comedy, My Favorite Year, all junior writer Benjy Stone was required to do was get the famously debauched British actor, Alan Swann, from his New York hotel to a nearby studio, where a popular comedy-variety show (think, “Your Show of Shows”) is being broadcast…
Read the full article » 3 Comments »MW on DVDs: The Killer Inside Me, The Law (La Loi), Palermo or Wolfsburg, Get Him to the Greek … and more
PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW The Killer Inside Me (Three Stars) U.S.; Michael Winterbottom, 2010 All these years, ever since it first appeared as a paperback original novel in 1952, a possible movie of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me — the first-person deep-noir tale of a smooth-talking small-town Southern deputy sheriff and murdering bastard…
Read the full article » 3 Comments »Review: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Up until the last ten minutes or so, I was really digging Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. It’s not that we needed to revisit Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko (Michael Douglas), that classically evil rich white bad guy who preceded (some might say, foretold) all those rich (mostly) white (mostly) bad guys who built…
Read the full article » 2 Comments »Wilmington on Movies: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, and Our Hitler
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.; Oliver Stone, 2010 Oliver Stone’s new movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps returns us to one of Stone’s great subjects of the 1980s: the glamour and corruption of the American financial markets. A sequel to Stone‘s 1987 Wall Street, this show plunges us back…
Read the full article » 1 Comment »Review – The Social Network (98.75% Spoiler-Free)
The Social Network is one of the greatest films not to quite make it to Great… perhaps as intended.
Read the full article » 33 Comments »Review: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Woody Allen‘s latest effort, You Will Find a Tall Dark Stranger, finds the director returning to Europe — the fertile ground which, in recent years, has served as the setting for the excellent Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the fair-to-middling Cassandra’s Dream and Scoop. This time around he’s back in London with a…
Read the full article »DVD Wrap: Robin Hood, (Untitled), Good, Experiment, Stripped Naked … and more
Just Wright Queen Latifah wants us to think of Just Wright as a modern version of Cinderella, this time staged against a backdrop of the National Basketball Association. It’s not a bad comparison, really, even if director Sanaa Hamri and writer Michael Elliot don’t seem particularly interested in repeating any of that classic fairytale’s basic…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Robin Hood, Charade, Playing for Time, Forbidden Planet, The Secret Behind Their Eyes … and more
PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW Robin Hood (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.; Ridley Scott, 2010 “To live outside the law, you must be honest,“ Bob Dylan once sang (in “”Absolutely Sweet Marie,“ from “Blonde on Blonde“). And that’s the credo that permeates most of the many, many screen incarnations of Robin Hood of Sherwood…
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Town, Easy A, Never Let Me Go, Mademoiselle Chambon, and Catfish
There’s not a role here that could have been played better, not an actor, including the much-dissed Ms. Lively, who could have been cast better (though, for old time’s sake, we might have liked to see Matt Damon as Jem). I think both this movie and the withering Gone, Baby, Gone (from Lehane) prove director Affleck loves his actors and tries to do his best by them. He’s also pretty damned smart about local color and atmosphere.
Read the full article » 4 Comments »Wilmington on Movies: I’m Still Here, Soul Kitchen and Bran Nue Dae
Okay. Here’s my opinion. I think they had us on. Obviously. Totally. To me (and to lots of others) this looks like a Borat-style mix of a fake central character (Phoenix travestying himself) and a fake premise with some (maybe quite a few) real reactions from the real world around him. (How many, who can tell?)
Read the full article » 5 Comments »DVD Wrap: The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, That Evening Sun, Why Did I Get Married, Too?, The Exploding Girl, Solitary Man … and more
The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond: Blu-ray That Evening Sun Movies put into limited release in the dead zone between December 26 and New Year’s Eve share certain traits. They tend to feature stars whose work has previously been recognized by the folks at AMPAS, but whose commercial prospects don’t warrant an expensive marketing campaign….
Read the full article » 1 Comment »Wilmington on DVDs: Solitary Man, Crumb, THX-1138, Macgruber and Caravaggio
PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW Solitary Man (Three Stars) U.S.; Brian Koppleman & David Levien, 2010 The thing that fascinates people about a serial seducer like Ben Kalmen (magnificently played by Michael Douglas in A Solitary Man) is his speed of conquest. What could take the average man, even in our liberated society, several months…
Read the full article » 2 Comments »Review – The American
It’s an odd thing. About 20 minutes into The American and similarly in another film I can’t review right now (Sept 4), I was strongly struck by the sense that critics would be wildly split on the film. Masterpiece or Bore. I feel The American is a beautifully rendered, intimate, deceivingly simple film loaded with…
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