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.
By Eleanor Ringel Cater
THOR, directed by Kenneth Branagh. Starring Chris Hemsworth, Anthony Hopkins and Natalie Portman.
Ah, “Thor.”
As in…gore?
Not that much really.
As in…lore?
What’s there is pretty skewed.
As in…more?
I’d say at least one sequel.
As in…bore?
Bingo.
By Eleanor Ringel Cater
I don’t know why, but something in my slip-slidey mind refuses to register WATER FOR ELEPHANTS as the title of the new movie based on Sara Gruen’s bestseller. Instead, it keeps mumbling LIKE WATER FOR ELEPHANTS which is a throwback to the smashing foood/sex/magic realism Mexican movie, LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE, made in 1992.
So, to set up my version of a firewall in my head, I keep saying elephants, elephants, elephants, over and over to myself.
By Eleanor Ringel Cater
With the death this past weekend of director Sidney Lumet, NYC has lost one its most ardent advocates. Oh, there are others. Woody Allen springs to mind, of course. Martin Scorsese perhaps. But Lumet ranks right up there, with the Big Apple admirers, directing movies like Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network.
By Eleanor Ringel Cater
To me, it’s never too late to speak of Elizabeth Taylor, who died last week, age 79, of congestive heart failure.
She was the most beautiful girl in the world, and she had the husbands — and the jewels to prove it.
But as she grew older and the film roles fewer and the health problems accelerated and the husbands (7; one, Richard Burton, she married twice) became less important, Taylor proved her beauty was much more than skin deep. She became a passionate and tremendously effective crusader in the fight against AIDS, a battle she joined as
By Eleanor Ringel Cater
THIS IS TIMED TO RUN ON AND SLIGHTLY AFTER MARCH 17…
I guess everyone can be expected to be Blarney-stoned on March 17, aka
St. Patrick’s Day.
But in case you’re out partying too hard to go green on screen, here are some Ireland-themed movies to take you through the weekend.
INTO THE WEST: A magical film that ties the realities of tinker-poor Ireland with the tale of the kelpie, a horse that carries its riders into the sea. Or is it just an old legend? Gabriel Byrne and Elen Barkin, who were married at
By Eleanor Ringel Cater
I went all the way with Justin Bieber.
I not only attended the 3-D Director’s Cut (40 minutes longer) of “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” but I stayed through the whole thing.
I mean, to the very end. I even saw the sing-along rip-off borrowed from The Beatles’ “The Yellow Submarine.”
As any nine-year-old girl can tell you, the kid’s talented. He’s cute. What I didn’t
By Eleanor Ringel Cater
The Oscars are upon us…
Again.
This year, the show, like everything else todayl, is desperate to skew young. Not an easy act for an event that’s been around 80 years.
I remember when the Oscars used to matter. Well, to me, that is. Sometime between the late ‘50s and late ‘60s. Then I went to college, the sixties happened and the only
By Eleanor Ringel Cater
As Peter Graves so famously said in “Airplane!”: “Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”
My name isn’t Joey and I’m not a 9-year-old boy, but I have ALWAYS loved movies about gladiators. Maybe it was seeing “Spartacus” at an impressionable age. Maybe it was Steve Reeves and those badly-dubbed Hercules movies.
At any rate, strictly speaking, “The Eagle” isn’t a a gladiator movie. There’s just one
“Fair Game,” as you may or may not remember, was the title of Valerie Plame’s best seller, which itself was taken from Dick Cheney’s comment about her back when he was Vice President.
To wit: “Valerie Plame is fair game.”
Playing fair, however, was another matter altogether as we see in Doug Limon’s fine new film, starring Naomi Watts as the out-ed CIA agent and Sean Penn as her outspoken husband, Joe Wilson
By Eleanor Ringel Cater
Special to SaportaReport
There’s nothing here but lots of nothing, done to a turn by John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers (“Match Point”) as his clueless partner/straight man.
That’s meant to be a compliment.
This pleasantly overloaded hokum casts Rhys Meyers as a diplomatic aide in Paris with 007 dreams. They are fulfilled — and then some— when he’s assigned to drive a cue-headed, playful-mode-full-on Travolta (there’s even a hamburger joke meant to evoke his Great Comeback in “Pulp Fiction.”)
The pair race around Paris (or some
