Eleanor Ringel, Movie Critic, was the film critic for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for almost 30 years. She was nominated multiple times for a Pulitzer Prize. She won the Best of Cox Critic, IMAGE Film & Video and Women In Film awards. An Atlanta native, she graduated from Westminster and Brown University. She was the critic on WXIA’s Noonday, a member of Entertainment Weekly's Critics Grid and wrote TV Guide’s movie/DVD. She is member of the National Society of Film Critics and currently talks about movies on WMLB and writes the Time Out column for the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
“Beautiful Boy” has one beauty of a performance by Timothée Chalamet and a pretty darn good one by Steve Carell.
Whether their work is enough to make up for the film’s problems is hard to say. It may depend on your interest in the subject matter: addiction in its most devious and cruel incarnation.
Houston, we have a problem.
“First Man” is worse than a bore. It is a slog – the most crushingly earthbound movie imaginable about going to the moon.
Forget mystery or poetry; this is a paean to strong silent men and mid-century technology. It’s pure white bread, gummy and well-chewed.
One measure of the affection (and, yes, lust) that has accrued to Robert Redford over his decades in movies is, when he walks into a bank in “The Old Man and the Gun,” we reflexively wonder, is he “walking” like an old man or does he, at 82, now walk like an old man?
Actually, in keeping with the delicacy of the acting ego, Redford is playing younger than his age.
A star isn’t exactly born in the newest iteration of the well-worn classic. After all, most of us have heard of Lady Gaga somehow, somewhere.
Besides, this isn’t even – technically – her feature film debut. According to IMDB, she’s already appeared on the big screen in “Machete Kills” “Muppets Most Wanted” (as herself) and “Men in Black 3” as “alien on TV monitors.”
Those of us with a particular fondness for the old “Seinfeld” series might recall the episode in which Jerry and the gang consider going to a movie called “Rochelle, Rochelle: A Young Girl’s Strange Erotic Journey from Milan to Minsk.”
Keira Knightley’s utterly silly new movie isn’t called “Colette, Colette,” but it might as well have been.
Taken on purely architectural terms, the titular structure in “The House with a Clock in Its Walls” is a cunning cross between the “Addams Family” manse and Mother Bates’ place in “Psycho.”
Cinematically, however, it’s on far trickier turf. Eli Roth, who took torture-porn to new…heights?…in “Cabin Fever” (which I saw and admired) and the “Hostel” movies (I took a pass), makes a bid for Tim Burton territory. In many ways, he’s successful.
To echo the old saying, I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. However, I know even less about artists, so I had no inkling that I would fall so hard for “Kusama: Infinity,” an extraordinary documentary about Yayoi Kusama, whom I’d never heard of.
Shame on me. She’s the world’s top-selling living female artist. And deservedly so. As Heather Lenz’s movie makes abundantly clear, Kusama is an astonishing original.
He is a world-famous novelist. His life is all about lectures, conferences and picking up prestigious awards.
She is his wife. Her life is all about…well…him.
But appearances can be deceiving, as we learn a bit too ham-handedly in ”The Wife,” based on Meg Wolitzer’s far more caustic, socially observant 2003 novel.
Forget that, um, stuff someone once said about there being “very good people on both sides.” In “Operation Finale,” there are some very good people on one side and some very, very bad people on the other.
Which, frankly, is as it should be since “Operation Finale” is the true story of how, in 1960, some Israeli secret agents tracked down one of Hitler’s top henchman, Adolf Eichmann, and brought him back to Israel for a public trial (the first globally televised trial in history, we’re told).
By Eleanor Ringel Cater What makes “Crazy Rich Asians” special? Why, the all-Asian cast, which hasn’t happened since 1993’s “The Joy Luck Club.” (By the way, a far better movie) What makes “Crazy Rich Asians” not special? Everything else. The plot, the characters, the dialogue…. With its putrid petri dish of obnoxious gender stereotypes, this thing could’ve […]
Spike Lee is at his best when he’ s mad as hell.
But he’s even better when he combines his rage with his caustic sense of humor, as he does in his brilliant new movie, “BlacKkKlansman.”
Lee can be so angry, so passionate, so…well… occasionally preachy that we forget he’s also very funny. His new movie, a prizewinner at Cannes last spring, is based on the sort of true story you couldn’t make up.
You know how sometimes you feel like a movie is being jammed down your throat, and you just don’t want to go see it out of sheer spite?
That’s how I felt about “Eighth Grade.” For at least the last month, every time there was some sort of talk show or morning show or whatever else that passes for televised entertainment these days, someone would be enthusiastically chatting up Bo Burnham’s debut film.
Filmmaker Marc Forster spends much of “Christopher Robin” trying to find that “Finding Neverland” sweet spot he worked so successfully in the 2004 Johnny Depp movie about James M. Barrie, the author of “Peter Pan.”
Not that the two are really very similar, but both pose the singular challenge of creating a film that appeals to both child-like adults and bonafide children. Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh share that peculiar territory (for better and worse) and both require careful handling when it comes to circling said territory.
Whether it means to or not, the last thing the documentary “Love, Cecil” will do is get you to, well, love Cecil.
Cecil in this case is Cecil Beaton, photographer, author, designer, social butterfly and stylist extraordinaire. To her credit, filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland reminds us that Beaton was virtually incapable of making an aesthetically clumsy choice.
My friend says there are two kinds of people in the world:
Those who can’t wait for another “Mamma Mia” movie and those who can.
I’m pretty firmly in the latter camp, but that doesn’t mean “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again” poses a particular hardship. In fact, like a drink with an umbrella, it goes down rather easily. It does, however, lack two things: Meryl Streep and a Greek island.
Everybody finds the first day of college a little weird, but it was, well, doubly so for Bobby Shafran.
When he arrived at Sullivan County Community College in 1980, total strangers were happy to see him. Guys high-fived him. Girls gave him a hug. Finally, someone put, well, two and two together and asked him if he was adopted. He was.
What does anyone remember about the original “Sicario?” (Assuming anyone remembers it at all.)
Well, let’s see….
Emily Blunt. An impressively cinematic border patrol shoot-out. Emily Blunt. Some tough drug talk. Emily Blunt. Helicopters zooming over the desert. Emily Blunt. Emily Blunt. Emily…
Heartfelt and, yes, heartwarming (aaarrgh, what a buzzkill word!!), “Hearts Beat Loud” reminds us there is life at the movies beyond dinosaurs and third-rate “Star Wars” one-offs.
It’s a small, smart picture about a father and daughter beautifully played by Nick Offerman (“Parks and Recreation”) and KIersey Clemons (“Flatliners,” “Transparent”).
We all know those t-shirts: “My parents went to Hawaii/Venice/Chicago and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”
The t-shirt for “Incredibles 2” should read: “It took 14 years to make a sequel and all we got was this lousy movie?”
Most movie-goers have been wild about “Incredibles 2,” but then they were wild about “The Incredibles” as well.
“Hereditary” is so all over the place that it’s often incoherent.
However, it is also a disturbing horror movie with the sort of burned-in-your-brain sequences that will jolt you awake in the middle of the night.
