Category: movies

Why Books Are Better Than Movies
The Wife a novel by Meg Wolitzer. Simon and Schuster. 219 pp. $16.00. **** They aren’t always better. The Godfather is a case in point, though it was a better book than it gets credit for. But The Wife is a much better book than movie not ...
Read more
Right Star, Wrong Prize
The Wife a film by Bjorn Runge. With Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Max Irons, Christian Slater. ***1/2 The reason to see this movie is for the performances, especially the one by Glenn Close, but also Max Irons and Christian Slater. Jonathan Pryce plays a nebbish named Joe Castleman and does a creditable job, but the man ...
Read more
How Then Should We Live?
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund De Waal. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 418 pp. $40.00 (the illustrated edition) **** Crazy Rich Asians a film by Jon M. Chu. With Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, Awkwafina. **** Scott Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from you and me.” Ernest Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.” Fitzgerald ...
Read more
Ditching the Dipshit
Juliet, Naked a film by Jesse Peretz. With Rose Byrne, Chris O’Dowd, Ethan Hawke, Azhy Robertson. ****1/2 There are all kinds of nutcase people on the Internet, pursuing this or that weird obsession (like Buddhism, Books, Movies, Life). Now and then I’ve stumbled across someone whose Internet presence resembles a weird rabbit hole. Duncan (Chris O’Dowd) ...
Read more
Who Rolled this Joint?
BlackkKlansman a film by Spike Lee. With John David Washington, Adam Driver, Topher Grace. *** I seem to be a minority of one, but I found this movie a major disappointment, perhaps because of my high expectations. I’m a Spike Lee fan from way back—Do the Right Thing is an old favorite—and I was looking forward ...
Read more
Most Terrifying Movie Title Ever
Eighth Grade a film by Bo Burnham. With Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Emily Robinson, Jake Ryan. ***** By some weird coincidence, in the past two weeks I have watched two movies about single fathers raising thirteen-year-old daughters. I think these are the only two such movies I’ve ever seen in my life. And though I absolutely ...
Read more
Or Maybe Leave a Small One
Leave No Trace a film by Debra Granik. With Ben Foster, Thomasin McKenzie. ***** Leave No Trace is a marvelous and heartbreaking film, certainly the best movie of the summer if not of the year so far. I’d seen the trailer five or six times and had the vague feeling this was one of those We’re-Better-Than-the-Rest-of-You ...
Read more
Catholic Means Universal
Pope Francis: A Man of his Word a film by Wim Winders. **** I was moved and inspired by the new movie about Pope Francis, which opened recently to almost no acclaim whatsoever. The IMDb site has virtually nothing on it, including no quotations, and if any movie ever deserved to have quotations, like maybe every ...
Read more
Arf Arf
Isle of Dogs a film by Wes Anderson. With (among many others) Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand. ***** My friend Sally (whom I seem to be mentioning all the time here) recently wrote me the following sentence in an e-mail: “I was trying to think of books, current and always current, ...
Read more
Paranoid Lunacy
The Death of Stalin a film by Armando Ianucci. With Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough. ***** Imagine working in an administration whose head man ran things entirely by whim. He liked you one day and didn’t like you the next, and if he didn’t like you he didn’t like the ...
Read more
Movies Movies Movies
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2018 My Lineup: The Issue of Mr. O’Dell/ Lovers of the Night; The Farm: Angola, USA;RBG; Owned: A Tale of Two Americas; 306 Hollywood; Three Identical Strangers; Las Nubes/Thy Kingdom Come; The Unafraid; Crime & Punishment. There comes a time when even the great ones have to hang up their spikes, or—before ...
Read more
No But I Read the Comic
Black Panther a film by Ryan Congler. With Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira. **** I hate comic book movies, and almost never go to them. I don’t like movies with super heroes, and people with spectacular special powers. I don’t enjoy the special effects of modern movies, and get tired of preview ...
Read more
Clint to a T
The 15:17 to Paris a film by Clint Eastwood. With Alek Skarlatos, Anthony Sadler, Spencer Stone, Judy Greer, Jenna Fischer. *** This review will be loaded with spoilers, but the event which inspired it was well-publicized when it happened, and has been spoken of plenty in the publicity for the movie. The three men who foiled ...
Read more
She Got Her Man
Phantom Thread a film by Paul Thomas Anderson. With Vicky Krieps, Daniel Day-Lewis, Lesley Manville ***** It’s tough to like a movie when you can’t stand the protagonist. But I absolutely loved Phantom Thread. It’s a candidate for my favorite movie of the year. Reynolds Woodcock—who has a hard name to live up to—is a neurotic, arrogant, ...
Read more
Sex in Heaven
Call Me By Your Name a film by Luca Guadagnino. With Armie Hammer, Timothee Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar. ****1/2 First the things I don’t like: Everybody is so good looking. They’re all so intelligent, and talented. This is the kind of movie where people are lying around their Italian villa in the sun, not doing ...
Read more
Woman in a Room Full of Men
The Post a film by Steven Spielberg. With Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson, Bob Odenkirk, Tracy Letts. **** There’s something irresistible about newspaper movies, the essentially blue collar guys who work there (they’re writers, but live more like private detectives) with their sleeves rolled up and their ties loosened, the looming deadlines, the whole oldstyle ...
Read more
Is That a Promise?
Ruminations on Star Wars: The Last Jedi a film by Rian Johnson. With Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega. ***1/2 For the critics who are now active and influential, the Star Wars movies were their first epics, the movies they grew up on and worshiped. I’m trying to think of what might ...
Read more
Ain’t Got One
The Shape of Water a film by Guillermo del Toro. With Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer. ****1/2 The Shape of Water is a tribute to movies from the fifties, men in suits and fedoras, women in dresses, the Red Menace hovering everywhere, monsters emerging from the deep. Two of its primary characters, Elisa ...
Read more
Who You Really Are (You Knew All Along)
Coco a film by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina. With Anthony Gonzalez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach. ***** I went to this movie as an act of desperation. Every day I read in the New York Times about the marvelous movies that are arriving for the holiday season and the great reviews they’ve gotten, ...
Read more
My Elmore Leonard Problem
Out of Sight from Four Later Novels by Elmore Leonard. Library of America. 961 pp. $40.00. I’m coming to the end of my Elmore Leonard period. I never thought, when I decided to look into his Detroit novels because my son now lives in Detroit and I’ve gotten to know the place a little, that I ...
Read more