Category: movies
- She Wasn’t Just a Dotty Old Lady IIThe Lady in the Van. A film by Nicholas Hytner. With Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Alex Jennings. I’m as much a fan of oldster movies as anyone—they’re about me, after all—and, like everyone else in the world, I love Maggie Smith. I especially like her as the outraged Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey, though the series ...Read more
- She Wasn’t Just a Dotty Old LadyIris Murdoch As I Knew Her by A.N. Wilson. Arrow Books. 276 pp. Those Brits do keep writing, don’t they? I look at the titles by A. N. Wilson, who is my rough contemporary (two years younger than I, actually) and I’m astonished, and somewhat ashamed, to see thirty books. (Compared to six for me. Eight ...Read more
- The Bitter Face of a Marriage45 Years A Film by Andrew Haigh In the same weekend, a friend e-mailed to tell me that 45 Years was a great film—he had just seen it with his wife to celebrate his 63rd birthday—and I heard another friend say, to someone who asked, “Don’t bother. The whole damn thing is too depressing.” I don’t think ...Read more
- I’m Eeenocent!Hail, Caesar! a film by the Coen brothers. For me the most surprising moment in Hail, Caesar was when the credits started to roll. I couldn’t believe an hour and forty-five minutes had passed. It seemed like about an hour. I also couldn’t believe that was all there was to the movie. They should have had ...Read more
- (Not Much)Room A Film by Lenny Abrahamson “Though the hut is small it includes the entire world.” –Sekito Kosan. Song of the Grass Roof Hut The background to the movie Room is a horrific crime: a man kidnaps a seventeen year old girl, puts her in a storage shed in his back yard, and keeps her there for seven ...Read more
- The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name Just SpokeCarol a film by Todd Haynes Carol is an almost unbelievably stylized, artful film. It isn’t just that the movie is a work of art, or that every scene is a work of art; every shot is a work of art. A shot of Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) riding away in a rain-sprinkled cab is full ...Read more
- I Me Mine I Me Mine I Me MineThe Big Short A film by Adam McKay The problem is human greed. That was my conclusion after watching the terrifically entertaining and stomach-churning film The Big Short. People have all kinds of solutions: we’ve got to break up Wall Street, we’ve got to punish the banks, we’ve got to put people in jail, but I ...Read more
- You Didn’t Know You Had It Until It Was GoneYouth A Film by Paolo Sorrentino “Two seniors for youth.” It was a funny remark that I didn’t realize I was making until I said it. But then, apparently, it was adopted all the way down the ticket line. If that Saturday afternoon showing in Asheville was any indication, the people who are seeing this movie ...Read more
- Mac the KnifeMacbeth A film by Justin Kurzel My wife thinks this film is a great work of art which captures the original primal energy of the Macbeth story, and thinks everyone should go see it (though she acknowledges not everyone will. By a long shot). I thought it was an interesting production but had lots of reservations ...Read more
- Only the Dead Know ItBrooklyn A film by John Crowley Brooklyn is like a dream. Like Bridge of Spies it takes place in 1950’s America (apparently the year is 1952, because our young couple sees Singin’ in the Rain), and like that earlier movie it gets the look of the era right. But while Bridge of Spies focused on a ...Read more
- Everybody Knew but Nobody Was Talkin’Spotlight A film by Tom McCarthy Spotlight is an absolutely thrilling movie, one of those newspaper movies where reporters shout at each other, slam their fists on the desk, burst into the records office a few minutes before closing time, run down the sidewalk shouting for a taxi, stay up too late, write at incredible speeds, ...Read more
- These People Want to Kill Us AllBridge of Spies A Film by Steven Spielberg The first thing you notice is that they got the look right. Not just the streets and the cars, but the people. Fifties fathers didn’t work out at the gym or train for triathalons. They ate pastrami on rye for lunch and pot roast for dinner, the mashed ...Read more
- Portrait of a TurdSteve Jobs A Film by Danny Boyle I’m a little slow on the uptake, often don’t read reviews of movies before I see them, so I was into the final third of Steve Jobs before I realized that this was a drama in three acts, that it focused on three specific moments, that the same characters ...Read more
- Not all that FreeFreeheld A Film by Peter Sollett This is a leukemia movie. Also a gay and lesbian movie, and a film about social justice, but most basically, and most movingly, it is a film about someone who dies. That’s the emotional focus. As I walked out of the theater, I said to my wife, “Why didn’t they ...Read more
- Who’s the Loser?Mississippi Grind A Film by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), one of two protagonists in the gambling/road trip/buddy movie Mississippi Grind, seems to be the man that Zhuangzi was talking about with the concept wu wei. After an early encounter over a poker game with Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn), he claims he does well ...Read more
- Granny’s a BitchGrandma. A film by Paul Weitz Elle (Lily Tomlin), the title character of Grandma, is almost unbelievably grouchy. Within the first twenty minutes of the movie she has broken up with what seems to be a perfectly nice and quite lovely girlfriend (Judy Greer), made a spectacle of herself in a local coffee shop and purposely ...Read more
- The Burning BuildingThe End of the Tour A film by James Ponsoldt I’ve always felt two ways about David Foster Wallace. Like Jonathan Lethem—whom I’ve been reading lately—he’s a major writer from a generation younger than mine. A few years ago I met a young writer who was wildly enthusiastic about Wallace, so I read a couple of ...Read more
- Xtreme OldsterThe 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared. A film by Felix Hengren The audience at the oldster movies is starting to get out of hand. There wasn’t much of a crowd in the Asheville multiplex where I saw this movie, but I might have been the only one under 70. We ...Read more
- No Shit, SherlockMr. Holmes (2015) A film by Bill Condon It is the dream of every author to create a great iconic character, someone that people recognize just by the name. Cervantes, our first novelist, created two. In a way he was just writing about two aspects of the human mind, or the human personality. He could as ...Read more
- Don’t Worry, No One Will Notice HerSpy. A film by Paul Feig. There have always been comedians who were funny partly because of the way they looked: Buster Keaton’s hangdog deadpan, for instance, or Stan Laurel’s clueless bewilderment, or Joe E. Brown’s funny rubbery face, whose mouth could open to an astonishing degree. When I was young my father liked to walk ...Read more
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All Shook UpWhat's in a Song? IIWriting for his LifeWhat’s in a Song?Mixed Feelings
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (127)American literature (226)art (123)Buddhism (171)Christianity (132)creative process (262)death and dying (144)meditation (125)movies (167)music (42)race (110)religion (196)sex (187)spirituality (174)the art of narrative (266)Uncategorized (21)world literature (23)