I have seen LINCOLN-- and he is Daniel Day-Lewis. This is an absolutely flawless performance, which together with Spielberg's direction, Tony Kushner's screenplay, based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin's book TEAM OF RIVALS, and a treasure trove of vivid performances -- has resulted in one of the finest movies of the year, and one [...]
It's hair-raising-- but DON'T MISS this FLIGHT! It's an unexpectedly emotional, quiet, faintly pious, but deeply engrossing dramatic thriller, which stars a slightly paunchy Denzel Washington as a veteran airline pilot named Whip Whitaker; he's as cocky as his name. He struts down the gangway, immaculate in uniform, sunglasses on, baby. In fact, he's cruising [...]
Ben Affleck has done it behind the camera again-- directed a first rate thriller! It's sleeker, sharper, and surer than his previous directorial work-- and it's already being touted as a possible Best Picture nominee: ARGO. It's a movie about making a movie, a story within a story, and as such is a great cinematic [...]
If Richard Gere is up on the big screen--I'm watching. I've been smitten since his Armani-clad turn as an AMERICAN GIGOLO. In ARBITRAGE, he's grayer, still a sharp dresser-- and still playing fast and loose with his personal and professional life. Technically "arbitrage" is defined as "the possibility of a risk-free profit at zero cost." [...]
I sat down to watch EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE. Make that "Extremely Tedious and Incredibly Morose." I had to stop after 20 minutes. I tried again, got through it, but found the film deeply off-putting. It features one of the most annoying kid's performances ever, and one of the most sentimentally oblique plot lines [...]
I was so angry with Steven Spielberg after I saw this movie. It had a perfectly good premise. A gorgeous horse named Joey and the poor English farm boy (Jeremy Irvine who looks like a young Tom Brady) who tamed and loved him, has to relinquish his pet to the brutality of World War I. [...]
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is a killer film that will leave you breathing hard, and thinking at warp speed. Directed by David Fincher and based on the smash international best-selling trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson, the American version is not as viscerally affecting as its Swedish cousin, but packs mighty tension into [...]
Perhaps the Red Sox should take a break, take a field trip, and see if the solution to their colossal and historic implosion can be found at the movies in the entertaining new film MONEYBALL. The movie champions those who challenge the conventional wisdom -- the ho-hummers who always say, "But that's how we've always done [...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBiOF3y1W0Y DRIVE just about drove me crazy. I was so driven to distraction after seeing it-- I nearly drove off the road. This is one of the best films I've experienced all year, an existential action thriller--To Drive, is To Be-- and it should drive its leading man Ryan Gosling straight to the Oscars. The movie took [...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSi3LdUrq18 I DON'T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT--but I sure wish the filmmakers had figured out how to make it look as hard as it is. Instead, the movie feels unimportant, and worse-- dated! The movie is based on the best-seller of the same name written by Allison Pearson, wife of NEW YORKER film critic [...]
