Movie column by Eleanor Ringel Cater
“Us” has its problems, but it has its pluses, too, most notably, a helluva kicker and an astounding double-whammy of a performance by Lupita Nyong’o.
“Get Out” is an admittedly hard act to follow, but Jordan Peele’s “Us” feels less like a sophomore slump than “Didn’t something like this happen to M. Night Shyamalan?”
Remember all those movies where the protagonists somehow switched bodies? (“Freaky Friday” — both versions — being the shining example).In the same vein, I really wish Amy Schumer and Rebel Wilson could’ve switched movies.
“Wonder Woman” was, in many ways, wonderful. But “Captain Marvel is, well, a marvel.Not to take anything away from Gal Gadot and her magic lasso, but there was a slight whiff of déjàvu in her fish-out-of-water culture clashes, as anyone who remembers Darryl Hannah in “Splash” might agree.
The customer, a petite European redhead, has just been poured a glass of Chablis by her nervous waitron. Taking a sip, she says appraisingly, “It’s like you. Promises a lot, then disappoints.”The same could be said about “Greta,” a stalker-cum-Bluebeard story with a twist. The customer happens to be the title character, Greta (Isabelle Huppert), a sixty-something widow living in Brooklyn.
The problem with “Everybody Knows” is that nobody cares.
Nobody in the audience, that is.
A surprising misfire by Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian director behind the remarkable Oscar-winners, “A Separation” and “The Salesman,” “Everybody Knows” takes place in a small Spanish village dominated by a dusty old clock tower.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s new movie, “Never Look Away,” has been nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards. And no wonder. It has the epic incident-laden sweep of something by Tolstoy or Dickens.
If von Donnersmarck’s name is in the least bit familiar, it’s probably for one of two reasons.
The title – “Cold War”– reflects the 15-year-long stalemate between its protagonists. That said, their romance blows both hot and cold.
This expertly done, bleakly ironic film, shot in luminous black-and-white by Pawel Pawlikowski, the director of the art-house hit, “Ida,” follows a love affair from its irreverent beginning to its eerie end.
One difficulty facing anyone who writes about the lovely new movie, “Stan & Ollie” is, do people still know who Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are?
I asked a culturally conscious Gen-Xer and she knew them. How? From the oft-glimpsed poster on “Friends,” where they’re sharing a bed.
“If Beale Street Could Talk” is the sort of nice movie you’d like to take home and introduce to your parents.
That doesn’t mean it’s a movie about nice things. Racism, poverty, rape, teen pregnancy, bigoted cops – all are part of the mix. No wonder. The movie is based on a 1974 novel by James Baldwin.
“Destroyer” sounds like an old Steven Seagal movie or a new Marvel villain.
It’s neither. Rather, this is a totally unexpected picture, a kind of sunbaked film noir, starring a remarkable Nicole Kidman as an LAPD cop at the very end of her tether.
Which of the following was the reason Ruth Bader Ginsburg was turned down by a dozen Manhattan law firms in the late ’50s, after graduating at the top of her class from Harvard and Columbia?
Rivals at last year’s Oscars, Sairose Ronan (“Lady Bird”) and Margot Robbie (“I, Tonya”) both lost to Frances McDormand in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”
In “Mary Queen of Scots,” they lose to a confused script and Josie Rourke’s confusing direction.
About 20 minutes into “VICE,” the new bio-pic about former Vice President Dick Cheney, I scribbled this note:
“Geez, this guy must’ve sat through ‘The Big Short’ a dozen times.”
Close, but, as they used to say, no cigar.
This guy directed “The Big Short.”
“She did possess that that proverbial something,” says narrator Willem Dafoe about the rock-star protagonist of “Vox Lux.”
The movie possesses that “proverbial something,” too, but whether that “something” is something you’d enjoy is debatable.
You have to be some kind of an actor to steal a movie from both Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone.
Well, Olivia Colman is some kind of an actor. The extraordinary kind.
She plays Queen Anne, an uncertain and often infantile monarch who ruled England in the early 1700’s.
Being a native Atlantan, I grew up in the last gasp of the despicable Jim Crow South. However, there were things I learned from the remarkable movie, “Green Book,” that I never knew.
Allow me to share where I’m coming from as I write about “At Eternity’s Gate,” Julian Schnabel’s wildly uneven, ultimately brilliant film about Vincent Van Gogh.
I love Van Gogh’s paintings. I love that his genius went unrecognized during his lifetime. I love that he went nuts.
As a trained professional (more or less), I’ve been called on to decipher everyone from Bergman and Tarkovsky to Cronenberg and Lynch.
I wasn’t always successful, but at least I felt comfortable at bat.
It’s Christmas and the family has gathered in Chicago. During an otherwise normal holiday dinner, the hostess, Ruth (Blythe Danner), with a sweet smile asks her guests, “And how do you two know each other?”
Given that Nick (Michael Shannon) and Bridget (Hilary Swank) are brother and sister and Ruth is their mom, it’s a bit awkward. It is also a bittersweet reminder that her Alzheimer’s isn’t getting any better.
“I’m a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker!”
So proclaims Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), the sad-sack, sourly funny anti-heroine of “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”
Set in the early 1990s, the movie is based on the true story of a writer who, having had some success with biographies (including a New York Times best-seller), found herself at an unfortunate impasse.
