The Oscars are Feb 24, and over the next few days there are few "Oscar" films I need to catch you up on before the big event! See a French film called AMOUR which won this year's Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and is among this year's nine Oscar nominees for Best Picture. [...]
I went expecting nothing-- and came away feeling like I'd really been somewhere: FAIRHAVEN-- an absorbingly authentic chamber piece about a restless man fishing for a meaningful life. Set in the working class town of Fairhaven on the south coast of Massachusetts, the film is a maiden voyage for its filmmaker Medford-born Tom O'Brien who [...]
I set my alarm (as a late riser, I'm always on L.A. time) and was up at the crack of 8:30 to hear Emma Stone and this year's Oscar Host Seth MacFarlane announce the nominations-- when I was blown out of my breakfast nook by the stupefying news that Kathryn Bigelow and Ben Affleck were [...]
Osama Bin Laden is dead. The chilling and detailed ZERO DARK THIRTY directed by Kathryn Bigelow (the first woman ever to win an Oscar for Best Director: THE HURT LOCKER) and written by Mark Boal tells us with great suspense and precision of the ten-year hunt for the terrorist leader, and his execution by Navy [...]
I have always loved this musical onstage, but was never so miserable as when I sat through all 157 minutes onscreen. LES MISERABLES--despite some exceptional musical performances--dies a torturous death by close-up at the hands of tone-deaf director Tom Hooper. "LES MIS" as we familiarly call it, is the theatrical extravaganza put to music by [...]
We saw. We met. We voted. The BOSTON SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS (BSFC) has just announced its awards for the best films, performances, and technical achievements in 15 major categories for 2012! Topping the list with three awards is director Kathryn Bigelow's ZERO DARK THIRTY about the ten-year hunt for Osama bin Laden which won BEST [...]
In a season that features at least one remarkable presidential portrayal--here comes another, and this one definitely the wackier. An Irish/Englishman playing Lincoln is one thing, but America's unofficial court jester and one time king of Caddy Shack is another kettle of acting entirely. Once you get over the shock of seeing Bill Murray as [...]
The most ravishing movie of the season is ANNA KARENINA , novelist Leo Tolstoy's sweeping pageant of love, marriage, passion, family, God, nature, and the constraints of class and society in 19th century Russia. The elegantly beautiful Keira Knightley stars as ANNA KARENINA who falls in love with a young, rich, good-looking cavalry officer, Count Vronsky. [...]
If you're in touch with your inner adolescent girl--and I am-- you'll love THE TWILIGHT SAGA:BREAKING DAWN- PART 2. I know it's been savaged in The Globe by Wesley Morris-- and many other critics. But honestly, having Wes review this film is like sending Andre the Giant to a pajama party--it's just not his milieu. [...]
The opening sequence of SKYFALL is a mind-boggling, ass-kicking, death-defying Rube Goldberg variation involving a speeding car, chasing a speeding train, carrying a giant front loader, with 007 and his nemesis-of-the-moment locked in combat and dangling by their fingertips, heading for an overpass, with a sniper looking to take one of them out! I nearly [...]
