Movie Reviews
Scott: The first inkling that Christmas was not a holiday for Hebrews came from a neighbor kid, the fine Aryan specimen Timothy Murphy: “My Uncle Roy says Jews celebrate Christmas by staying home and counting …
Playing George Smiley in the new film of John le Carré’s most famous book, Gary Oldman is a long, gentlemanly way from his punky Sid Vicious in 1986’s Sid and Nancy. At times he is …
Glad tidings, of coming holiday gifts: “I won’t talk!” silently mouths an actor in the silent movie being made inside The Artist, a film that is itself almost entirely silent in speech. Soon after, a …
In the early moments of Shame, we learn that sex addict Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender) has a huge member, as if nature was instructing him in the way he ought to go and he was …
As the year starts to fade, we find time for some three-star entertainments: Martin Scorsese, our national auteur and No. 1 movie fan, converts his status into both commercial and emotional terms with Hugo. Without …
Marilyn Monroe in England, Werner Herzog in Texas, George Clooney in Hawaii, Serge Gainsbourg in Paris (and next week, Scorsese’s Hugo in Paris). Off we go: Hardly anyone recalls that Marilyn Monroe won major French …
Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar needs a livelier title. May I suggest Anal-Retention Serenade? In this movie, a young American discovers his anti-Red obsession by finding Bolshevik propaganda flyers on the street and is soon proudly …
Photographed in a dry, dingy beige, the film looks like it were being viewed through a discarded snakeskin. This is not altogether a fault; the anemic film stock suits the sultry drip of setting and …
William Shakespeare is virtually illiterate in Anonymous, but since the movie seems to have been made for (and by) illiterates, why worry? The film is mainly about Edward de Vere, the highly educated, modestly talented …
As Dr. Robert Ledgard in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In, Antonio Banderas has a John Boehner tan and a rather Republican attitude (cut, cut, cut). Experimenting in his luxurious home surgery near Toledo, …
O happy column: three very good movies and two close enough. Blackthorn A real Western is riding our way from (surprise) South America. Up in the high Andes, Blackthorn is much more than an exotic …
A slice-of-life indie about a young man facing cancer, overstuffed with Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Up in the Air’s Anna Kendrick as the world’s worst beginning therapist, and Anjelica Huston. Rogen looms especially large as …
The one baseball game given serious time in Moneyball is the Sept. 4, 2002, showdown in Oakland. Over 55,000 fans saw the Athletics blow a huge lead over Kansas City, then win on Scott Hatteberg’s …
We drive through a plague, past dear Mozart, and on to pretty Coronado: Ryan Gosling, once a Mouseketeer on TV, will never be one of the big, terse dominators (Mitchum, Marvin, Bronson, Eastwood). But his …
The sport of mixed martial arts battles for legitimacy, being perceived somewhere between a barbaric form of pugilism and a glorified WWF match. Likewise, MMA movies have had to forge a meager existence as genre …
Amid the 9/11 memorials, another salute is needed. This Saturday, September 3, marks a decade since Pauline Kael died at 82. She retired in 1991, ending 24 years as movie critic of The New Yorker. …