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The Brothers Solomon (2007)
Considering the scathing reviews that greeted The Brothers Solomon upon its theatrical release, you’d think the filmmakers had been guilty of beating children and small dogs. I am happy to report that the movie I saw was guilty of nothing worse than mediocrity. Directed by Bob Odenkirk and penned by Saturday Night Live alum Will…
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Lady in the Water (2006)
Judging by the charges of rank self-indulgence that M. Night Shyamalan endured at the time for Lady in the Water, you might half-expect it to be 108 minutes of the director singing in the shower, brushing his teeth, and taking a dump while reading the Philadelphia Inquirer. The movie’s reception by critics in 2006 was…
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Year by year: My faves of the 1950s
Eisenhower. The Red Scare. Suburbia. Shopping malls. McDonald’s. Television. Rock ‘n’ roll. Beatniks. Duck and cover. Oh, and movies, especially the rise of world cinema. 1950: 10. Born Yesterday, director: George Cukor9. Born to Be Bad, director: Nicholas Ray8. Gun Crazy, Joseph H. Lewis7. The Gunfighter, director: Henry King6. Night and the City, director: Jules…
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Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
I love Moonrise Kingdom. There, I said it. End of review. OK, that’s not really the end. Pardon my rapturous take, but writer-director Wes Anderson appears to be one of very few filmmakers who can truly capture the strange world of adolescent love — its exuberance, its earnestness and its flat-out weirdness. Anderson’s best works,…
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The Lookout (2007)
In trying to recreate a sensibility from a bygone era, modern-day film noirs can seem as stiff and artificial as Botox treatment, but not The Lookout. Veteran screenwriter Scott Frank, making an impressive directorial debut here, adheres to the tenets of the genre without it feeling like a hermetically sealed tribute. The psychologically hobbled hero,…
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Year by year: My faves of the 1960s
The decade of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, assassinations, hippies, mods, the British Invasion, Dylan, drugs, the counterculture, man lands on the moon, Woodstock, the Manson family. It was a tumultuous decade, to put it mildly, and movies reflected it. 1960: 10. The Virgin Spring, director: Ingmar Bergman9. Spartacus, director: Stanley Kubrick8. Inherit the Wind,…
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Capote (2005)
Truly great acting is always thrilling to see, but it reaches a different level of accomplishment when the performance is of a real-life icon. Such is the case with Capote. Philip Seymour Hoffman more than earned his Best Actor Oscar as the late author Truman Capote. The actor, arguably the best of his generation, transcends…
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The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)
In its tale of death and loyalty along the U.S.-Mexico border, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada bears similarities to the great westerns of John Ford. Like that masterful storyteller, director Tommy Lee Jones (in his big-screen directorial debut) and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga revel in the splendor of nature and the small, lyrical moments of…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 