Category: Eleanor Ringel Cater

You’ve probably heard of the old Steve McQueen/Yul Brynner western, “The Magnificent Seven.”

Well, so has Quentin Tarantino.

There’s been so much talk about “The Force Awakens” that the rest of the holiday movies are having trouble making themselves known.

So here we are looking at a long Christmas weekend. And quite a few movies opening, Here’s some guidance (well, let’s face it, some personal opinion.)

Tackling Shakespeare on film is always a risky proposition. Done well, it can be revelatory — not only a new way to approach the Bard, but also a way to make the Bard newly approachable to audiences.

However, Aussie filmmaker Justin Kurzel’s “Macbeth” so favors blood — buckets of blood — over poetry, it may as well have a number after the title. “The Scottish Play IV,” a la “Friday the 13th” or “Final Destination.” Make no mistake; this is the splatter “Macbeth.”

No doubt about it. The Kray brothers were beastie boys through and through.

Sadists in Saville Row suits, these twin brothers ruled the London underworld in the mini-mod ‘60s. While the Beatles were busy with “Rubber Soul,” the Krays were busy rubbing people out.

The less you know about Dalton Trumbo, the more you may like “Trumbo.”

“Breaking Bad’s” Bryan Cranston stars as the irascible, witty and courageous screenwriter whose movies include “Roman Holiday” and “Spartacus.”

“Spotlight” is the wretched title of one of the best movies of the year.

It’s possible the filmmakers chose it because it serves a double purpose. Not only does it convey darkness illuminated, but it’s also the name of a small investigative team at The Boston Globe.

“Steve Jobs” is a peculiar, thrilling and audacious film about a peculiar, thrilling and audacious man. And I can’t understand why no one wants to see it.

After a limited release in early October, the picture opened wide (as they say in The Biz) in about 2,411 theaters.

Yoko Ono was right. Women are the n-word of the world.

And they deserve far better than the mostly insufferable “Suffragette,” a drab, murky, dispiriting movie about the struggle for women’s suffrage in Great Britain, circa 1912.

The film is doubly frustrating because it has a good story to tell — one many of us don’t know.

The tempestuous head chef on the hugely popular reality show, “Hell’s Kitchen,” has nothing on Bradley Cooper’s hot-tempered cook in “Burnt.”

As culinary star Adam Jones, he throws pots, pans and hissy fits with alarming regularity.

She was one half of one of the most passionate kisses in the history of movies.

John Wayne pulls Maureen O’Hara to him in the midst of a violent storm and plants one on her. The scene is from “The Quiet Man,” John Ford’s romantic and thoroughly pixilated movie about an Ireland that never was but kind of always is.

It’s terrible to watch enchantment leak from a film.

It’s especially so when the primary source for the picture is one of the most enduring enchantments of all time: James M. Barrie’s tale of Peter Pan, Captain Hook and Neverland.

“Sicario” opens with a bang. Several bangs, actually.

We’re in the middle of a FBI raid taking place somewhere near Phoenix. The ostensible mission is to rescue drug-war hostages, but as Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) and her fellow agents soon discover, they’ve shot their way into something far worse.

Noel Coward was wrong. Sometimes the right people travel. And sometimes, we get to go with them. At the movies, at least.

Robert Redford and Nick Nolte would seem very much the wrong people to be traveling in this adaptation of Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods.”

“Phoenix” reminds me of “The Lives of Others.”

Not because the plot, characters, themes or even tone are similar. But everyone who took a chance on “Others” – a 2006 German film set in East Berlin in the ‘80s – came away incredibly excited and engaged by what they had seen. People I thought would never in a zillion years even give the picture a look couldn’t stop talking about it.

So it is with “Phoenix,” if you’ll just go see it.

Finding what others have had to say about Marlon Brando is easy.

Anna Magnani, his co-star in “The Fugitive Kind,” called him “great, half-crazy and impossible to work with.”

“But,” she added, “better a hundred Brandos any day than a one nice, dull negative man.

Sidney Lumet, who directed “The Fugitive Kind,” said of his star, “Like many great actors, he is also a very suspicious man. He likes to test his directors.”