Tag: drama
The Hateful Eight
Friday, January 22nd, 2016 Film Reviews,Each new film by Quentin Tarantino generates a storm of anticipation. We know what to expect, but initially The Hateful Eight took me by surprise. It is a long movie, divided into chapters, with an old-fashioned intermission. Instead of the usual gore fest the first half is all dialogue and scene-setting. If this appeals more […]
The Danish Girl
Friday, January 22nd, 2016 Film Reviews,When Gore Vidal’s novel, Myra Breckinridge, was made into a truly lamentable movie in 1970, transgender issues were hardly front page news. The idea that someone could feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body, or vice versa, was the stuff of ribald comedy. The wheel has turned so completely that transgenderism now occupies […]
Carol
Thursday, January 14th, 2016 Film Reviews,It’s difficult to make a great movie from a great novel. Even the best directors struggle to capture the psychological nuances, the purposeful construction of personalities and subplots. An author can tell us much that a director can only suggest, unless he or she wants to make an unbearably wordy film. In Carol, Todd Haynes […]
The Big Short
Thursday, January 14th, 2016 Film Reviews,Don’t feel too bad if you fail to understand what a Collateral Debt Obligation (CDO) is, or how it works. Many thousands of investors who bought these packages in the lead-up to the American housing market crash of 2008, had no idea what they were buying. Not many of the Wall Street brokers who were […]
The Revenant
Thursday, January 7th, 2016 Film Reviews,When he was receiving the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director at last year’s Academy Awards, Alejandro González Iñárritu, was already preoccupied with his next feature. He had begun planning The Revenant as early as 2011 but put it on hold when lead actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, was required for The Wolf of Wall Street. […]
The Bélier Family
Wednesday, January 6th, 2016 Film Reviews,For a people convinced of their intellectual superiority over the rest of the planet, the French have an incurable fondness for low-brow comedy and feel-good stories. Perhaps they’re just like us, after all. This year’s box office smash in France was La Famille Bélier, a comedy, like The Intouchables (2011) that finds humour and inspiration […]
Suffragette
Wednesday, January 6th, 2016 Film Reviews,It’s a common tactic when making a film about an historical moment to focus on a single participant. Make that character fictional and you have more room to move, being able to channel all the important points into an Everyman – or Everywoman. In Suffragette, Carey Mulligan plays that role. She is Maude Watts, an […]
Youth
Monday, January 4th, 2016 Film Reviews,Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must be the Place was the most cruelly underrated film of 2011. He followed up with The Great Beauty (2013), which was as close to a masterpiece that Italy has produced since the glory days of Cinecittà. Now we have Youth, another multi-layered homage to Fellini, filled with striking images and dubious […]
Joy
Monday, January 4th, 2016 Film Reviews,David O. Russell is one of the few active Hollywood directors that thinks in terms of stories, scripts and actors rather than big budgets and special effects. Paolo Sorrentino is the most talented director to emerge from Italy over the past two decades. Both men have new movies released this week, movies that are flawed […]
By the Sea
Thursday, December 10th, 2015 Film Reviews,By the Sea has received such terrible notices I went along with diminished expectations – which was probably the ideal frame of mind in which to view Angelina Jolie Pitt’s third outing as a director. Think: “I know this is going to be bad,” and for a long time you can fool yourself that it […]