jhep

This movie feels more like a play than a film; Pinter-like with lots of ominous undertones i.e., fashion designer Reynolds being told by sister Cyril not to pick a fight with her because she will annihilate him !! The story gradually looses its way and by the time we get to the final denouement with its twist on “the-way-a-man’s-heart-is-through-his-stomach” you get the feeling that director Anderson has been playing a bit of a practical joke on us. Let’s hope Alma’s cooking tips don’t catch on with any disenchanted housewives in the audience !

This film strikes me as wildly self-indulgent. I saw it with my brother and we agreed to walk out after about an hour. The script is largely non-existent. Much of the dialogue is impossible to follow and cries out for sub-titles. Within the first hour we get to see about 1 minute of Danny Glover, which is a terrible waste. I so enjoyed Glover's performance in Jim Jarmusch’s very impressive “The Dead Don’t Die” that the fact that he was in this movie got me wanting to see it. All in all a very disappointing and disorganized mess that goes to the "whimsy well" at least once too often and then makes a habit of it. Final note: because only young black male actors are allowed to use the N-word, the film goes overboard and uses it "in your face" ad nauseum. Who knows maybe that’s why so many white, middle class, liberal film critics felt compelled to give it a glowing review after squirming and sweating in their seats for a couple of hours?

A perfect dramatic vehicle to express The Age of Trump and the malaise currently engulfing many of us…..A look inside a decadent society-cum-political system that has totally lost its bearings. A giddy mixture of Fellini’s Satyricon, the BBC mini-series “I Claudius” and Bunuel and Dali’s “L’Age d’Or”.…The film presents us with a sinister realm in which The Absurd has triumphed and, as a result, we find ourselves thrust into a bitter, ferociously angry and at times comical film which somehow combines elements of Lewis Carroll and Hieronymus Bosch. We find ourselves immersed in dream-like, fairy tale realm dominated by an unquenchable lust for POWER, greed and infantilized vanity (sound familiar ?); an unhinged culture of sado-masochism, ennui and bizarre eccentricity …..The result is a dazzling achievement and (if you have the stomach for it) a refreshingly candid diagnosis of what now confronts us in this aforementioned Age of Trump. Finally let me say that “The Favourite” would makes a terrific double feature with Adam McKay’s “Vice”; his brilliant and searing re-visiting of the George **** Cheney years in power/“government”.

Another JAW-DROPPING ACHIEVEMENT from Adam McKay. A film to match his wildly original “The Big Short” of three years back. McKay has learned to trust his talent and his wacky inspirations and hunches so completely that the result is cinematic story-telling magic and take-no-prisoners devastating social and political satire !….And what a cast he has assembled here- Bale, Adams, Carell and Rockwell DAZZLE you with their talent and the sheer ease and exuberance with which they display it. We’re talking people who have completely mastered their craft and are a total joy to watch……The result of all this is that “Vice” emerges as is a chilling cinematic achievement-cum-cautionary tale whose alternate title might well be “Escape From the Planet of the Over-Reaching Munchkins” !!…..and to anyone reading this who’s thinking “Ya. Okay. But tell us how you really feel”… I say I LIKED this movie !

The film would have made more sense if during the bank robbery scenes Robert Redford had worn a button on his lapel saying “Don’t be alarmed. I’m Bob Redford and you’re in a scene in my Swan Song movie about a lovable old coot who robs banks but would NOT hurt a fly!”……Films based on “true stories” often get filmmakers and script writers into a lot of trouble and sadly this meandering tale is no exception. Maybe this explains why it comes complete with at least a dozen “helpful” notices that say “Tuesday, November 12th 1981, 4:03 PM” and that seem to belong in another movie……Redford is charming but his character remains so vague and undeveloped that we gradually lose interest in him. The real heartbreak here is that Sissy Spacek’s characterization is so promising that she ALMOST gives the story a badly needed core of authenticity. However the Whimsy Tsunami eventually sweeps everything in it path and - sadly- Spacek’s truly fine performance goes with it.

Geoffrey Rush and director Stanley Tucci have set themselves the task of proving that Alberto Giacometti was nothing less than THE most boring man that ever lived !!!…..the Good News is that they succeed in establishing this fact ``beyond a reasonable doubt`` within the first 20 minutes of the **** Bad News is- what do you do with the next hour or so your movie ?…..Sadly this viewer will never know because he was called away by an urgent call from his dry cleaners and quitted the cinema faster than you can say “Will you have fries with that ?”

Feels like a Made-for-TV movie....I kept waiting for the Pillsbury Doughboy to show up and remind me to maybe go to the kitchen and check out the **** make this movie at all ? Why tell this story in 2017 ?....It all feels too pat and pre-digested....Also eerily dated- nothing much to offer that is new and insightful and will hold our ****'s more of a "and then kidnappers said.... yadda, yadda, yadda" and Getty said "well in that case.... yadda, yadda, **** in all sort of by-the-numbers Movie-of-the-Week stuff circa 1970s or **** I'm being nasty and will probably pay for it somehow some day (a safe will fall on my head as I'm walking down the street sort of thing)but I hate being bored and- sad but true- this movie really did bore me.

NO SCRIPT.....material that is all over the map and can't decide what the film is really about....."Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" with a really bad head cold !...the waste if good cast....sorry to see Sam Rockwell and Frances MacDormand desperately attempting to breath some life and credibility into this chaotic, self-important wannabe "edgy" **** what's with extravaganza of profanity and four letter words ?....I started to feel I was at a frat party with a lot of teenage boys who couldn't hold their liquor !

NO SCRIPT just an accumulation of coy “moments” that go nowhere and leave both viewer and film-maker **** too much cutesy sweetness that overstays its welcome !!......I could not BELIEVE how long this film went on !!!……and the shrill and repetitive mother-daughter confrontations became a kind of unrelenting psychodrama and an ordeal to sit though……. My hunch is that many critics like this movie because (given our embattled world these days) they hunger for lightweight reassuring fluff and - poor schmucks- could not see that this is “faux” lightweight reassuring fluff ! Even Laurie Metcalf’s potentially very interesting performance as Lady Bird’s mother gets wasted and has nowhere to go given the triteness of the story that she is given to work with.

I agree with what NikolayG says here....what the heck is the explanation for the BIG BIG DRAMATIC moment of the **** a peep about it !.....also many of the serious problems with the film originate from the somewhat "goofy" premise that this couple will suddenly TOTALLY put their lives on hold so they can help this Russian mobster on the run "save his family and get them to **** really !! Also after the wife sees her husband having passionate sex with another woman in the back of a party they are attending- she SULKS for a few minutes and never brings it up !.....ya sure....happens all the time !

Do war movies need to have a script ?.......YES. Do war movies have to have characters ?......Yes again....."Dunkirk" has neither script nor characters and as a result you rapidly lose interest in what becomes of any of the individuals we encounter because you never bond with them. In fact after a while they just seem very unlucky in their various attempts to get away!) This is a very cold film about an amazing event. Nolan seems far more interested in showing what bungled mess the Dunkirk experience was. He depicts the whole thing as futile, messy and basically more ANNOYING than anything else i.e., what a bunch of Losers! The result is a sort of yuppie take on WW2. And a rather desperate tossing in of Churchill's "We shall never surrender" speech in the final moments of the film doesn't make up for this film's fatal wrongheaded approach to its subject.

“Alone in Berlin” is directed by Swiss filmmaker Vincent Perez with a savvy, sureness-of-touch and talent for creating suspense fit to rival even the supreme master of this genre, Roman Polanski. The result is a film which somehow manages to deal with matters of the greatest political and moral significance and yet, in the same cinematic breath so to speak, unfold as one of the most riveting thrillers I’ve seen in years. Both Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson are superb here but it’s especially Gleeson’s uncanny performance (in perfect synch with Perez’s direction) that anchors the film and gives it its a remorseless “bite”. Gleeson plays Otto Quangel with a stoicism and an inscrutableness which conveys both heartbreak and grim resolve. Much of the time he and director Perez simply allow his silent expressionless FACE tell us all we need to know about what is occurring. Emma Thompson contributes an equally understated and restrained performance that reveals what a genuinely serious and talented actor she has become. It should also noted that the film is an adaptation of the novel “Every Man Dies Alone” written by German novelist Hans Fallada just after the war and shortly before his death. Primo Levi has described it as “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the ****.” Fallada’s novels have been praised by the likes of Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann and Graham Greene and this film version is an absolute gem which does full credit to his remarkable talent. The novel itself was translated into English in 2009 and quickly became a surprise best seller in the United Kingdom. Its publication was hailed by the New York Times as “a signal literary event“.

I totally agree with four most negative Critic Reviews for this film....."Captain Fantastic" is sloppy and lazy and self-indulgent as **** - much worse- it's MANIPULATIVE in ways that any Madison Avenue spin doctor would give his eyeteeth to emulate .....the script is almost laughable it makes so little sense...there is something seriously INFANTILIZED about the Ben character which is conveniently set aside with the cinematic equivalent of a shrug..... and the appeal of the entire film is basically one of romancing and above all infantilizing it's target audience....your review's reference to The Waltons is spot on....This film is a wannabe Waltons for arm-chair activists !……and "enough already" with being ga-ga for Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations.

"Equity" has very serious script problems. The result of which is that the film feels more like a TV mini-series or TV drama series rather than an actual movie. It also seems strangely dated given our post-2008 Wall St economic meltdown because this is basically a “glass ceiling” story about how women are discriminated against in a macho business world...... However, the feminism quickly gets tangled up in a storyline about insider trading, stock market manipulation and wannabe SEC-type government investigations and eventually the whole thing “builds” to a confusing and unconvincing climax/denouement (by the way, just exactly what WAS in that Hedgehog stuffed animal ?)…...The script and the film bites off more than it can chew and gets “done in” by an excess of loose ends and false starts. Furthermore Adam McKay’s brilliant “The Big Short” that dealt with the 2008 Wall St.-created global economic meltdown still has to be in many filmgoers minds at this point; a film that dealt with its material with something like genius, and THAT definitely can’t help “Equity”.

My Amnesia Film Festival and the latest “Jason Bourne” Psychologists have been making important discoveries about the link between trauma and amnesia. There appears to be healthy and even necessary connection between the two; when trauma occurs we forget what would be too painful or too debilitating to remember. The issue then becomes…when does such amnesia cease to play it’s life-preserving and equilibrium-maintaining role and become **** that point one might almost say “ask Jason Bourne”. Robert Ludlum created the Jason Bourne character in Bourne Trilogy thrillers and now Matt Damon has incarnated him in four films based on Ludlum’s work. Indeed Ludlum and Damon can now be given credit for having brought amnesia back into the marketplace where it belongs and to have rescued the concept itself from…..amnesia. Gore Vidal should also be mentioned as having made a contribution in this regard for his having come up with the phrase “The United States of Amnesia”. At the risk of going out on a limb I would even argue that amnesia is in fact THE phenomenon of our time and I predict that future historians will look back on the 20th and 21st centuries as having been massively affected by trauma and by the amnestic response to trauma which necessarily follows. For my baby boom generation the Second World War was the overwhelmingly defining event of our time.……“How so?” some may ask “You weren’t even around”. My answer to that is “No. But our parents were.” It is psychologically naïve to imagine that the massive culture shocks that accompanied WW2 came to an end in August 1945 when Japan surrendered and the war ended, which is another way of saying that we Baby Boomers and our slightly older siblings made out entrance on to the Stage of Life amidst a massively traumatized and overwhelmed society made up of parents, relations and various societal guardians and caregivers attempting to cope with massive culture shock which was the psychological fall-out of WW2, The Crazy Making War ……which brings us back to Jason Bourne. Robert Ludlum intuitively connected with this vital cultural information as well as the potential “thriller gold mine” it suggested and came up with the intriguing character of Jason Bourne, the exquisitely skilled and highly trained CIA “killing machine” who happens to have a severe case of amnesia. The latest version of these stories of what has become a veritable franchise is simply titled “Jason Bourne”. In it Matt Damon has patented a look of glowering and thoughtful intelligence (in fact the kind of look some of us have when we try to remember where we left our keys) which look signals to his enthralled and loyal fans (in which I include myself) that he’s about unleash such unimaginable mayhem on an opponent, that he or she will instantly rue the day they were born…..…And although in less competent hands this can be overdone Damon has the knack of pulling it off every time. Added to all the interesting depth psychology presented here we find some very considerable creative smarts on the part of director Paul Greengrass. Among them, in the first hour or so of the film, are truly amazing scenes of the desperate political turmoil in Greece which are conveyed with remarkable realism and urgency. Also adding the film’s political heft and credentials is the fact that there are clear and sympathetic references to Edward Snowden and his leaks of the massive NSA surveillance that he made public. In fact the second half of the film develops a major storyline developed about a Verizon-like media giant called “Deep Dreams” whose creator and CEO is being pressured by the CIA chief (Tommy Lee Jones at his world-weary best) into allowing the government access to its customers private records. And finally, political heft-wise, we have what is arguably the most dazzling star of the film; a chilling look at the staggering level of the sophistication that the technological surveillance industry has “achieved” in this age of drone missile attacks and satellite hyper-scrutiny of citizens. Worth noting also is the fact that Paul Greengrass who also directed the extremely impressive and utterly riveting “United 93”: the story of the plane hi-jacked during the 9/11 attacks that crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to regain control of the plane. He also directed “The Bourne Supremacy” which is still the best of the Bourne series and which benefited hugely from a brilliant script by Tony Gilroy and amazing performances by Franka Potente and Matt Damon. One of these days I will compile a list of my favorite Amnesia Films. Already I know that Edward Dmytryk’s wonderful “Mirage” will be on it and also Alfred Hitchcock’s delightful “Spellbound”. Both films star the great Gregory Peck and no one knew how to play amnesiacs better than Gregory Peck…..…. except maybe (now) Matt Damon.

This film works so well because it’s a kind of cautionary tale about toxic agendas and the people who become “possessed” by them. The film is a kind of horror story in which all the horror is just below the surface where (as Freud and Jung etc. have observed) it can do the most damage. Kate Beckinsale, the delightful star of the film, and director Whit Stillman succeed so brilliantly in concocting their sardonic vision of 18th century English society that in many ways the result invites comparison with Alexander MacKendrick’s great and scathing 1957 muck-raking classic “Sweet Smell of Success”. Beckinsale’s inspired, in fact jaw-dropping performance here as a sort of wayward 18th century Soccer Mom run amok and gone dangerously to seed is a challenge to describe in mere words. But begin by thinking Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate” meets Nancy Reagan on a Bad Hair day and you are on the right **** fact all of “Love and Friendship” feels VERY CONTEMPORARY and can be seen as a political metaphor for the emergence of today’s neoliberal social and economic environment complete with 1%-Push Coming Austerity-Shove !…..In a world in which the Looking-Out-for- Number-One lifestyle has become the order of the day and successfully implanted into our DNA, Kate Beckinsale’s sociopathic Lady Susan could easily be running for political office on a “Let them eat cake” ticket. The film has a few momentary missteps and unfortunately these come in first five minutes and can have the effect of setting off considerable alarm bells……Happily this lapse in creative judgment is momentary and film quickly finds its own rhythm and soon moves from strength to strength. (The early lapses consist of a few “goofy” shots in which we are rapidly shown the names and faces of a dozen or so characters in the story. However, these shots which are intended as a sort of parody of early silent movies. are done so rapidly as to be meaningless as information and (more grievous artistically) don’t really work as parody because they’re out of place with the very traditional and very solid narrative that follows. Whit Stillman is an extremely interesting filmmaker and his films “Metropolitan” and “The Last Days of Disco” are two of the most original American films of recent memory. Even more good news here is that both Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny who star here also starred in “The Last Days of Disco” and each instinctively understands “the Stillman universe”. In fact Beckinsale’s performance here is nothing short of mesmerizing and you can’t wait to see what she will say or do next !……But anyone deciding to see the film should go prepared for a more sombre Jane Austen story than usual (the Nancy Reagan/Mrs. Robinson angle) so maybe think Jane Austen with a hefty dollop of Henry James ……. but let me qualify this statement by pointing out that the note of moral seriousness is always present in Jane Austen’s work (and Whit Stillman’s for that matter) and that Austen has a knack of making her “sunshine” so welcome precisely because her “clouds” are real clouds and portend real downpours !……In fact Whit Stillman‘s “Love and Friendship” works so well because he understands this so thoroughly.

What a wonderful film! What a wonderful FRIENDLY and authentic movie……FRIENDLY because it’s such an intimate work and a labor of love by everyone involved- the script writer, the director and the entire cast……and so the result is like getting a letter from a good friend you’d lost touch with years ago........what I mean is that people who relate to this film will quickly BOND with it; BOND with Jude Law (dazzling and almost unrecognizable) and Colin Firth (who cements his claim to being the Undisputed Champion of a certain quixotic Hard-Won Common Sense, and Nicole Kidman (brandishing new maturity, bite and conviction !) …...what “grabs” you most is the film’s ring of truth; it really feels like an INSIDER’S TAKE on the nature of the creative process, the artistic inspiration that drives it and (something the cast presumably knows all too well !) the perils confronting talented artists in a decidedly ga-ga celebrity culture !…..it makes sense that the two main stars of the film as well as the director should be Brits - what we get here is an Old World European culture commenting on a newfangled, New World "celebrity culture" bedazzled by philistine notions of power, money and creative merit (one in which money Trumps all ?). …. all of which is to say, once again, that this is a very personal work and one that feels thoroughly genuine and authentic.

The Man Who Knew Infinity … is a remarkable film that is hard to “see“..... It is based on the true story of the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan whose extraordinary gifts catapulted him from obscurity to being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in Great Britain and to becoming the youngest person ever to become a Fellow of Trinity College at Cambridge. ….These developments occurred in the year 1918 when Ramanujan was just 31...…The reason I say “The Man Who Knew Infinity” is “hard to see” is because it's about the culture shock which occurs when East meets **** more exactly when WEST meets EAST; in effect film is basically dealing with the waning of a Euro-centric society addicted to the fantasy and hubris of limitless progress through science and technology (and the Cartesian rationalism-on-steroids that drives it) and what happens when such a society abruptly encounters a more comprehensive, more wholistic culture in which intuition, poetic inspiration and mysticism haven’t yet lost their influence on the human imagination: viz. West meets **** film stars Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel (the star of Danny Boyle‘s superb “Slumdog Millionaire”) and both are truly excellent **** today’s world of accelerating climate change and the out-of-control technology that powers it “The Man Who Knew Infinity” contains a message- indeed a warning- that definitely needs to be heeded.

I LOVED this movie !.....think Jean Renoir's "Boudu Saved From Drowning" meets Milos Forman's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" meets Anatole Litvak’s “Anastasia” (one of my all-time favorite films) meets George Cukor’s delicious Cary Grant-Katherine Hepburn “Holiday”, and you start to “get” where “Demolition” is coming from……. You also get why it makes an instant conquest of it’s audience’s affections and is a film destined to become a cult classic.…. There are a few slight (and unnecessary) excesses in the script at the film’s conclusion (and one feels that Gyllenhaal takes at least a couple of showers too many), but these are no more than flaws in an amazingly fresh, sure-footed and compulsively viewable film ……The entire cast is SUPERB, even down to the most fleeting “walk on” parts…. What a shame so few critics could see any of **** fortunately the extremely positive User Reviews are offering an accurate assessment of this remarkable film.....Once again you end up feeling "Thank God for Metacritic's User Reviews !" .

Where to begin !….the Coen Brothers’ cinematic food fight ……their In-Your-Face hissy fit …. their de-constructed parody OF a parody ..….whatever you decide to call it it’s an embarrassing mess made up of undigested plot morsels and themes and feels INTERMINABLE to sit through……can this really be the same George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Joel and Ethan Coen of the witty and razor-sharp “Burn After Reading” ? …..can this rambling, self-indulgent “smirk-fest” with its hastily assembled grab-bag of “bits” that RAPIDLY wear out their welcome, possibly be the work of the film-makers who made “A Serious Man” or “No Country For Old ****, by the way, “The Robe” was actually quite an intelligent film and Richard Burton was terrific in it……so enough cinematic **** Ethan an Joel; time to get back to work.....enough already with the Food Fight Thing !

“The Big Short or "A Funny Thing Happened On My Way to the Global Economic Meltdown” THE HEDGE FUND MANAGER AS FOLK HERO…..Okay, okay, the idea may call for a little tweaking at first glance but in today’s topsy-turvy world where- as Chris Hedges points out- almost every public institution has morphed into its opposite and become its own nemesis, this hedge-fund-manager-as-folk-hero idea might not be all that **** any event film maker Adam McKay makes a compelling, indeed fascinating case for this in his new film “The Big Short”. The film is based on the Michael Lewis’ book “The Big Short; Inside the Doomsday Machine” and Adam McKay‘s film adaptation has wisely chosen to turn the story into a David and Goliath fable about “the little Hedge Fund that could”. The result is a parable of daring existential savvy and “cojones” triumphing over institutionalized corruption and tunnel vision; the sort of thing Kierkegaard or Albert Camus would applaud in a nanosecond, and although not quite your by-the-numbers Robin Hood caper, then at least something sufficiently “Robin Hood-ish” to have something for everyone to take heart about (i.e., the previously mentioned Little-Hedge-Fund-That-Could angle). Incongruous as all of this may sound, the end result is an extraordinary cinematic and political delight from start to finish and is even (somehow?) perfect Christmas/Holiday Season fare. McKay’s innovative direction and his extraordinarily inspired cast keep things percolating at just the right, slightly off-kilter and wacky tempo. Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Brad Pitt (one of the film’s producers) and Ryan Gosling are all clearly on board with McKay’s Smartest-Guys-in-the-Room interpretation of events that what ultimately comes across is a sort of Lord-of-the-Rings-Comes-to-Wall-St. epic that is the movie equivalent of a real page-turner ! It would be a serious mistake to dismiss “The Big Short” as some kind of “feel good” exercise about small time hedge fund types taking big risks and hitting the jack pot because this very unusual film is far more than a quirky comedy or satire. When the dust finally settles what we have here is actually passionate, scathing and somehow monumental indictment not only of Wall St. but (even more courageous to state and more worrisome to consider) the outrageous complicity of elected officials who chose to do the bidding of their “Too-Big-To-Fail” banking overseers…..“Wall St. got bailed out, Main Street got sold out !” as the popular chant goes. The SEC/Security Exchange Commission, as well as the credit rating agencies Standard and Poors and Moody’s (see photo below) come in for more than a few well-deserved, well-aimed body blows. “ Big Short” is an important film about what is arguably THE major struggle of our times: (a dismantled, downsized nominal democracy versus an insatiable and rapacious oligarchy). It also happens to be a work so strangely compelling that you will probably end up committing large chunks of it to memory after 2 or 3 viewings due to the fact that it regales us with such an audacious handling of its material - real gusto, passion and a sense of outrage rarely seen these days. What the viewer experiences is not unlike watching someone making their way over Niagara Falls on a tightrope: you hold your breath, wrestle with the impulse to cover your eyes and yet- through the whole ordeal- welcome every moment with real gratitude (psychologist Abraham Maslow’s idea that our perception of Truth helps to keep us sane and healthy probably kicks in here somewhere.) This is also one of the most cinematically and politically FEARLESS films you’ll ever see; every gamble the script makes (and there are many) and every wildly intuitive hunch the direction takes (and there many) pays off totally…. nothing is overstated, no shot is held for even a nanosecond too long…our interest never **** would have to go back to Robert Altman on a very good day I.e., “**** Godard or Truffaut or Woody Allen on a good day to find a film this innovative. What we end up watching in “The Big Short” is a story that is stranger than fiction and yet one that unfolds, is tried-and-true fairy tale tradition, with a cast of spellbound couriers, mysterious ancestral curses and wise old and not-so-old **** short the world that History itself appears to have been keeping in store for us now uber-challenged 21st century residents of planet Earth. All of this Adam McKay has chosen to direct with a gusto and panache that borders on audacity. Fortunately a kind of grace seems to hover over his every directorial decision and the result is dazzling and at times mesmerizing. We end up cheering for these underdog hedge fund managers who have thrown caution to the winds and risked everything on the use of their **** well as for a gifted American film maker and artist named Adam McKay who can so clearly empathize with them.

What a strangely pointless film !……so **** bored with its material and so boring to watch - a kind of Dutiful Exercise for everyone involved....Tiresome one-note performances wedded to tedious one-note direction. Rarely have I watched a film script and a ham-fisted directorial touch produce a work that so totally abandoned the characters ! They are depicted here with something like complete indifference. They bore us and ultimately seem almost ridiculous and pathetic..... The only thing this movie has going for it is snob **** that - sad to say- is almost always enough to "wow" the critics.

Sicario…..ultimately falls between two stools ….and succumbs Big Time to the lure of a certain cinematic grandstanding in which off-the-charts “machismo” - the film is marinated in it- totally wins the day and we enter a magical 007/Charles Bronson/Spaghetti Western Universe (think Clint Eastwood‘s The-Man-With-No-Name) where Adult Supervision has been left far behind (poor Emily Blunt gets saddled with the Adult Supervision stuff)……In a sense all this is really too bad because director Denis Villeneuve is an amazingly gifted film maker who can build suspense out of almost nothing and from having someone sneeze or make a cup of coffee using the wrong **** use of music is truly **** sadly what held so much promise rapidly moves from art to something like Goofy Hyper-caffeinated **** enter A MAN’S WORLD here folks where poor, bumbling Emily Blunt will be given no quarter because quite frankly, and there’s no nice way of saying this, she’s just a Dumb Girl …. The final .007 half hour of the film disintegrates into something out of a “Twilight Zone” episode mixed with flashes from old “Zorro” movies, with Benicio del Toro shooting Bad Guys like they props in some extremely violent (some would say nifty) video game and even shooting the luckless Emily Blunt character at one point (“Don’t ever point a gun at me” he rebukes her caddishly after firing a couple of bullets into her)..…Do you get the picture ?….….clearly both script writer Taylor Sheridan and director Denis Villeneuve have opted to throw caution to the winds by this **** the disquieting result is that the Benicio del Toro character is suddenly channeling for- that's right - good old Charles Bronson (and I`m talking The Real Deal Charles here: the Bronson of “Death Wish”, “Death Wish 2” and “Death Wish 3” …none of your candy-assed, squeamish liberal stuff !) …..and in the very next scene, by way of a Macho Man encore, del Toro threatens to blow silly `do-gooder` Emily Blunt`s brains out if she doesn’t put her John Hancock to that paper saying that all these carrying-on have been done strictly ``by the book”; "You’d be committing voluntary suicide” del Toro assures Blunt as he presses his revolver more firmly into her neck…..Emily weeps momentarily but happily opts to sign (getting shot once in a movie is enough for even your most hardened Do-Gooder ; there's no point pressing your luck !!...….Sadly the silliness of all this seems to have been lost on many of the critics who - like director Villeneuve- apparently still hanker for old-fashioned, hokey, macho man action yarns about REAL MEN living in a REAL MAN‘S WORLD…..Sorry kids...time to put your comic books away and grow up.

I should confess that I WALKED OUT after just over 40 minutes of this non-stop VERY tedious **** story seemed to be stuck.....paralyzed .......incapable of moving beyond its opening **** felt like a REALLY BAD ONE-PLAY with utterly banal dialogue and two dimensional **** like watching one of the soap operas my grandmother loved so dearly in the **** THIS from DANNY BOYLE the genius who created "Slumdog Millionaire", "127 Hours" and "28 Days Later".......that's two bombs in row Danny ("Trance" and now this )......hope you get your mojo back soon; you are an amazingly talented film maker.

**** maybe it IS “Jason Bourne Goes To **** what?….Well I’ll tell you “what”. If Matt Damon wasn’t so good at being both manly and cute-and-cuddly at the same time this film would be in big trouble. However Matt is so good at both that leaving him on Mars is…. well…..UNTHINKABLE. Yes Murphy’s Law gets worked to death here (I stopped counting at SNAFU # 36) AND the script really does suffer from a serious gas shortage somewhere near the half-way **** Matt makes a lot of the film “work”. I mean HE’S MATT DAMON for God‘s sake ! Of course the world is on tenterhooks until he’s been safely returned to Earth !

........the direction of this film is SO HEAVY HANDED that I soon felt numb and then indifferent and **** feels like a 1970s Made-for-TV movie that used to make a lot of sense when you were 12 years old i.e., everything gets TELEGRAPHED to you in scene after scene and those ominous words "dumbed down" soon hover over every scene...... the scattered all-over-the-map script seems to be searching in vain for a focus to help organize the **** moderate this criticism somewhat, I would add that biography can be one of the most unforgiving film genres there is.......aesthetically- speaking people often end up living extremely unsatisfying lives !

Notes for ****. Rethink **** you are going to do "Harold and Maude" or "Auntie Mame" you have to DO them !.....In life there are 'Solutions' and there are "Solutionnatas Della Luchai" and you must strive to keep that in mind. .....(The world does not need another "Waiting For Godot".)

WOW ! What an EXHILARATING ride ! Thank you Woody for one of your absolutely finest films; up there with Match Point, Manhattan Murder Mysteries, Small Time Crooks, Manhattan, Shadows and Fog, Radio Days, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and- yes- Broadway Danny Rose !………Woody Allen when he‘s at home and reading Stendhal and Graham Greene……Having read the reviews I walked in expecting very little but I left the theatre having seen one of the most powerful, superbly acted and brilliantly directed films I have ever seen ! “Irrational Man” is a sort of Zen Master’s punch in the head. A “film noir” to rival Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Double Indemnity, Welles’ Touch of Evil or Carol Reeds‘ The Third **** what an amazing cast ! From the opening scene to the final shot this movie grabs you and fascinates you and has you eagerly anticipating the next plot twist. Both Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix grace this film with performances that can only be termed “jaw-dropping”; their talent defying you to sit back and say “well, it’s just a movie”, they COMMAND your attention every moment. What an amazing film ! What a gem!…..This is why people keep going to movies.

I agree with the other negative reviews (of which there are far too few).....this is a very mediocre film about a very unusual tragedy that happened to a rather dull and very successful bourgeois who edits a slick fashion ****- he was very determined to fight back against his cruel **** where is the drama or the interest beyond this point ?......the film runs out of steam very early and director Schnabel really has no idea of what to do with the material.....also Dumas' "The Count of Monte Cristo" isn't really a jaw-dropping masterpiece as Bauby and the film and implies. Martin Pistorius had a similar condition and wrote a far more interesting book about it called "Ghost Boy".

What a revolting sleazy little film. So gross. So tasteless. So **** all of it carefully packaged in an aggressively “How dare you not find this hip" ........ Not so much a film as a kind of desperate "commodity" for desperate times, like a series of really bad Saturday Night Live “zany” sketches at their ham-fisted, bottom-feeding worst. I walked **** needs this garbage !

In an ideal Metacritic world I would give this film a 6.5.……almost single-handedly Robert Downey Jr. nearly pulls it off and brings the huge disabled cruise ship that is “The Judge“ to safe harbor….Downey creates a character that is so intriguing and somehow “new” that the film almost succeeds in holding our interest very much in spite of its unwieldy and all-over-the-map script and direction.……My feeling is that the film is worth seeing almost exclusively because of the opportunity to watch Downey and Robert Duvall “do their stuff”; each provides a sort of master classes in acting….. However, the film as a whole suffers SO badly from its impulse to go madly in all directions that it begins to feel more like a television mini-series crammed into a feature film format than an actual successful drama. Both the director and the script writer lack a sense of the those crucial boundaries that any film genre needs to accommodate and “The Judge” loses its way as indulges in far too many (almost whimsical) dramatic angles and possibilities **** this a psychological family drama ? a courtroom drama ? a film noir? a thriller? a coming-of-age story?……worst of all when the film begins to lose its way and grow quite muddled, the solution choice appears to be to pile on EVEN MORE plot developments…and this is what eventually very nearly “sinks” it (despite Downey and Duvall’s very strong performances)… ……a good example of a film that succeeds in being a legal/courtroom drama AND a psychological thriller is the George Clooney film “Michael Clayton”- a really remarkable achievement and one of the best American films I have seen in decades ….and another example is the more modest achievement of the Matt Damon film “The Rainmaker” of several years back….both these films respect the limitations of the film genre they’re working in while at the same time cautiously stretching the material to add new dimensions …… “The Judge” tries hard to do this but fails; it is an interesting failure, however, and hopefully the director will one day learn to reign in his overly ambitious narrative impulses…… …....another criticism I have is that the dialogue in the film is frequently frankly unbelievable and over-the-top witty and clever ….many of these characters would have to be geniuses or near-geniuses to come up with the things they come out with and Downey’s character especially often comes across as a sort of combination of Sherlock Holmes, James Bond and Zorro ! In fact dangerously close to the superhero Downey has now played in THREE “Iron Man” films !.... It's not be a stretch I think to suggest that at this point in his career Downey needs to watch out for Iron Man Damage !….. My final criticism of this film is is its lack of any clear FOCUS. In fact, at times it feels more like a dream the director is having than an actual movie and the narrative line all but disappears in a muddled and undisciplined phantasmagoria and this is really too bad because there is in fact a lot to like here; hence my ideal 6.5 rating.

**** **** believable characters......cuteness **** brother and I were lucky in that we agreed almost immediately about how pointless this film was, left the theater and got our money cheerfully refunded.......

This film is not very interesting ! A thriller without thrills. The script MIGHT work as a short story but not as a film...... all the Cat-and-Mouse stuff soon fizzles out and that restless When-is-the-Movie-Going- to-Start feeling sets in......…. Far too ambitious a project for a first-time director and far too slight a story line for a feature film (let alone a wannabe Shocking **** finally, having one of your main characters be an overbearing smuck with a drinking problem is NEVER a good idea- no wonder Ava and Caleb wanted to escape !

A very “iffy” script ultimately does this film in….. The cast (especially Al Pacino who is frequently charming-as-hell but has very little to work with) try in vain to breath life into the film’s not especially interesting story. What they have to contend with is the ghost of some relentlessly tragic 1930s Bette Davis “soaper” that lurks just out of sight in almost every scene (Bette Davis is going blind/Danny Collin’s son has leukemia/brave Bette is the only one who knows The Secret and now it will die with her/estranged Pacino‘s little grand-daughter has ADHD and Hope’s only hope- her name IS actually Hope- is to go to the VERY EXPENSIVE SCHOOL her that parents can‘t afford)…..enough already !…..…Another serious problem with the film is that the director himself seems to participate in the Ga-Ga Celebrity Culture he is exploring; none of the film’s material is presented “tongue in cheek”, there is no subtext; almost everyone in this story is a bit of a starstruck hick- including the director. As a matter of fact the premise of the film itself betrays what can be called dangerously high levels of starstruck-ness i.e., just HOW amazing is it that John Lennon wrote an encouraging letter to a fellow-musician ?…..In your mind’s eye you can almost see the session where the idea for "Dannt Collins" was “pitched” to some wavering potential backer……. “I mean do you GET it !?…...it’s a letter FROM JOHN LENNON !!!…......from LENNON !!!!!!!!…….…the guy GOT this letter ….. He got this letter from JOHN LEN-”.

The Madly-Off-in-All-Directions-Nut is a tough one to crack. Those of us living with ADHD or something very close to it can readily testify to this fact. Furthermore, today’s ADHD culture exasperates the problem for just about everyone….hardly anyone is immune…....enter Noah Baumbach and his latest film “While We’re Young” - a gloriously high-energy film that can’t decide what its about and very nearly lands in the ditch as a result !….. To be more precise Noah-Baumbach-the-Director becomes perilously entangled with wrong-headed choices that Noah-Baumbach-The-Overly-Ambitious-Scriptwriter comes up with …and it is this that very nearly land “While We’re Young” in the ditch. The good news, however, is that the film survives the perverse, near fatal “foot-shooting” antics of its script and ultimately succeeds in winning our affection and even our gratitude. However, it was definitely a close call and the audience at the screening I attended seemed at times to be almost holding it’s breath wondering if Baumbach would pull it off. He did and here’s **** one thing there is Baumbach-the-Director’s truly joyous, at times almost ecstatic embracing of the possibilities that the cinema offers. The very strong first half of “While We’re Young” is nothing short of jubilant in its high-spiritedness and enthusiastic accounts of what movies, and indeed Life itself, has to offer. The wacky, wonderful, almost Franciscan young couple that Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts hook up with as the film begins offers Baumbach ideal material to showcase his great love of cinema and the first hour of the film goes **** swimmingly in fact, that it is this brilliant first half of the film that ultimately saves it from the far less successful second half. At about the mid-point of the story- quite weirdly- an entirely different movie arrives on the scene and Baumbach’s overly-ambitious, ADD scriptwriter takes control of the film ! What promised to be a “Harold and Maude-ish” escapade or a new edition of Milos Forman’s delightful “Taking Off” turns into a murky and unsatisfying. wannabe film noir; a puzzling and heady concoction of “Match Point”, “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and Roman Polanski‘s “The Tenant” (with just a daub of “Double Indemnity” and “Blow Up” thrown in for good measure !)..…..anyway none of this “washes” and this second half of the film is badly in need of a far more nuanced re-write. Even worse this new plot development threatens to “sour” all that went before and the entire film threatens to IMPLODE in a key scene in which Adam Driver (who plays the husband in the free-wheeling young couple) suggests that he is not above blackmailing Naomi Watts about the brief sexual indiscretion they had together while they were both “high” on drugs.……This, along with a few other seriously “off” narrative moments, would have sunk a less interesting film by a less interesting director but “While We’re Young” recovers even from these missteps and - almost miraculously -regains its balance. In effect Baumbach-The-Gifted-Director managing to recoup the losses incurred by Baumbach-The-Scriptwriter and the latter’s overly ambitious indeed, ultimately untenable Scriptwriters-Don‘t-Try-This-At-Home script. That the film manages to survive its “near-death” experience is also due to the wonderful cast Baumbach has assembled. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts are perfect as the middle-aged couple whose life has mysteriously “stalled”. Each of them nails the “quiet desperation” that has engulfed them as they attempt to recall when was the last time they went on a trip to Europe. Adam Driver is equally powerful and convincing as their suitably quixotic and unfathomable Sammy Glickish new friend…… (footnote- it should be noted that Baumbach CAN write great scripts- as his exquisite “Greenberg” (his masterpiece to date) proves only too well; and likewise his “Francis Ha”- a sort of updated “Perils of Pauline” set in the New York art scene and featuring an unsinkable performance by Greta Gerwig) …All-in-all Baumbach needs to learn to stop fretting about his material and realize that in film especially More-is-Less….. and needs to trust in his innate smarts and avoid the “fussing” that very nearly destroys the delightful “souffle” that is “While We’re Young”…… Happily the “souffle” HAS survived. This is due in no small part, to the cinematic smarts that are in evidence -for example- in the scenes in which Naomi Watts’ connects with the benefits of hip hop aerobics and appears to awaken from some bewitching, decades-long coma! In the dream-like, at time indecipherable language of the cinema, these moments guide “While We’re Young” away from its stormy and potentially ruinous narrative seas and into safe harbor.

I went the see the new Dustin Hoffman movie“Boychoir” the other night and I can’t say enough good things about it !! What a GLORIOUS film…..Among its many, many delights, it features music straight from heaven that will have you out scouring the nearest music store for CD’s showcasing boy’s choirs (and very possibly the film’s own fabulous soundtrack, which may well be destined for chart-busting best sales!)........Most of all this film is INTELLIGENT and full of WISDOM and INSIGHT....... It is also beautifully directed, shot and edited and features a remarkably credible and deeply satisfying script..... Director Francois Girard (of "The Red Violin" fame) is following here in the noble steps of another Francois... ..("Truffaut" in case you haven't guessed) whose film "The Wild Child", "Boychoir" closely **** a sort of contemporary version of the Truffaut film with Hoffman playing Dr. **** role that Truffaut played.......Indeed the spirit of Francois Truffaut seems to hover lovingly over every frame of this delightful film.........Hoffman has developed into an actor who is a master of understatement and subtle suggestion. His performance here is almost invisible !.....he keeps you wanting to know MORE about his character, while at the same time deliberately and resolutely concealing these revelations within an aura of intrigue and the effect is mesmerizing !........when he does finally "deliver" in a few crucial scenes, you hang on his every word! .... ....and finally "Boychoir" is a film that is badly needed at this point in time. Our too beleaguered and overwrought civilization needs so badly to reconnect with the humane values and wisdom that Francois Girard’s film envelopes us in……please go see this film and then tell your friends about **** needs to find its own audience and to be acclaimed for the remarkably fine work that it is... .....and then there’s THE MUSIC !!!!

What a VILE movie.....sitting through it was a kind of emotional abuse ****'re talking ham-fisted, cinematic Hissy Fit here !…. so glad to see that some comments here are by people who also hated the film.....I walked out after about 45 minutes- enough is enough !..........."Whiplash" reminds me of “Black Swan” of a few years ago- another bizarre and nasty, mean-spirited exercise that was likewise delivered with sledge-hammer **** sort of thing that makes you wonder what the director's childhood must have been like !......so sad to see so many film critics and User Review critics still buying into this sort of ADOLESCENT **** crap that went out with John Wayne all those years ago ..... and then giving Simmons an Oscar for his one-note, over-the-top performance !!......all in all a film by an adolescent FOR adolescents...more infantilization of pop culture.

Neil Young as Norma Desmond ?? How does it **** you wonderful people out there in the **** ......“mercifully the fantasy now engulfed her”….. Megalomania seems to have taken over a terrific musician and song writer who now appears more inclined to guru-hood and a “fire walk with me” attitude. Also definitely lose the hat Neil !!

Sad to say the extremely thought-provoking premise of this film viz., the ultimate “gated community” hovering over planet Earth and housing the ultimate 1% (presumably celebrating feudalism’s Big Comeback)…. gets lost due to the combination of Neill Blomkamp’s ham-fisted, self-indulgent direction (think Chest-Pounding Self Righteousness) and the film’s surprisingly infantilized, soap opera-ish script (a cross between “The Perils of Pauline” wherein foul villains drool menacingly over helpless maidens and D.W. Griffith‘s “Way Down East”, in which a luckless Lillian Gish very nearly goes over Niagara Falls on an iceberg So “Elysium” ends up seriously TRIVIALIZING its strongest points and **** a sense Elysium the movie, becomes little more than an hysterical rant that the residents of Elysium, the space station, could actually welcome, chuckle over and dismiss as a badly bungled “close shave” that paradoxically actually strengthens their hold on power "Look at the loonies we have to deal with !" Everything of interest that the movie has to offer gets said in the first 45 minutes (albeit in a garbled and heavy-handed way) and from that point on the audience finds itself locked inside a shrill and very LOUD/noisy video game. Soon those **** words “DUMBING DOWN” seem to float ominously over every scene and the film speedily wears out it‘s welcome……...I’m a great admirer of Matt Damon’s work (Promised Land, Green Zone, Good Will Hunting, the “Bourne” films) and I was very impressed with Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9” so the bitterness of my comments here is due in large part by the fact that I was really looking forward to this film….only to discover that its director has either “bitten off much more that he can chew” or else has allowed his feelings to run away with him (and needs to re-visit “Yentl” and mull over its quotation from the Talmud “Who is strong “He who controls his passions!”.) Whatever the reason “Elysium” ends up being more of a temper tantrum than a work of art and although director Neill Blomkamp’s heart may be in the right place ……he has bungled this film badly.

BORING !!! ......NO SCRIPT......annoying characters out of aTommy Hilfiger **** enough already with the hyper caffeinated zombies who can merge into "wooshes of energy" and CLIMB WALLS .......that hurt !.....come on guys- I`m not THAT stupid !.............I only wish that whoever wrote the half-baked script for this turkey had had a fraction of the energy and ability to focus as those zombies !.....and finally to all the people who gave this film 9s and 10s and found it A-M-A-Z-I-N-G I say "Please get A Life

Ignore the basically clueless media reviews…..this is a very intelligent and deeply intuitive film by the man who wrote the screenplay for “The Truman Show” and who both wrote and directed “**** forget the “Twilight”-related baggage (which the critics apparently **** to it with fresh eyes and enjoy the entirely believable and cohesive sci-fi world that Andrew Niccol has created……this is better film than (the interesting) “Looper” and an infinitely better film than the current darling of the media critics “Amour”.

It’s alarming to see how savvy some filmmakers are becoming at knowing just what material and what “spin” will gain them big critical jackpots and festival jury prizes. "Amour" is a case in point and suggests that the line between demographic-massaging advertising agencies and shrewd, cachet-hunting filmmakers is diminishing at an alarming rate. The film is basically a genteel “infomercial” that argues the case for euthanasia; it's an highly aggressive, in-your-face exercise and a very ONE-NOTE, highly aggressive, in-your-face exercise..........What it also has “going for it” in some circles at any rate- is the Jerry Springer-like touch of casting two well known stars of yesteryear, now in their 80s, in the lead roles. This brings an eerie Reality TV touch to the proceedings and something of a “frisson nouveau” to your card-carrying film buff audience (the demographic-massaging angle) Think how much, by way of comparison, the casting two relative unknowns would have affected the film’s reception...... In Teen Speak it would have been …..“B-O-R-R-R-I-N-G !!!” Jean-Louis Trintignant in particular struggles to breath life into the sparse characterization that writer/director Haneke has provided for him. However his efforts are in vain, for the forces of “infomercial-hood” are aligned against him here and (even more artistically crippling) Haneke’s somewhat gleeful penchant for the morbid. This latter holds sway as his camera zooms in to capture every detail of the physical and mental disintegration of Trintignant‘s wife (the now 85-year-old star of "Hiroshima Mon Amour" Emmanuelle Riva.) Indeed, Riva’s character soon becomes a sort of laboratory specimen that Haneke is studying intently under the microscope “I wonder what will “go” next he seems to be asking himself, pencil in hand with the result that The Wife (which is the sort of generic entity that Riva is finally reduced to) ends up becoming disconcertingly like that giant bug that Gregor Samsa turns into in Kafka’s "The Metamorphosis" By contrast, one wonders what Jean Renoir or Douglas Sirk would have done with this material. The fact that Riva’s character is not particularly sympathetic to begin with only adds to the uneasiness- indeed, queasiness- we end up experiencing as we’re invited to observe the spectacle of her relentless undoing....... Sad to say, by that point in the film either this latter studying-the-bug-under-the-microscope sensation or else flat out boredom seem to be our only options. "Amour" is an award-winning and highly pretentious film and the two go together much too often for comfort these days.

Smashed" is excellent.... it deals with addiction issues and dysfunctional family system and alcoholism issues.... but it's far from being a "downer", it's very positive and intelligent in its take on this material ....great cast !....great direction....great script.....a very MATURE, INSIGHTFUL and THOUGHTFUL **** God knows we could these qualities a lot more these days !! Go see it !!

Basically a surprisingly old fashion biopic - late 1930s, 1940s **** Jake Hamilton of "Empire" magazine that you have sited among your critics' responses has hit the nail-on-head when he sites DAVID BOWIE's utterly delightful and indeed mesmerizing performance as Andy **** every scene he was in I eagerly awaited EVERY WORD that Bowie's Warhol had to say......a truly amazing and fascinating performance by Bowie- a real treat !!...for this reason I am giving the film a 5 instead of a 2 rating

FUMBLING-ON-THE-FIVE-YARD-LINE

Lady Macbeth famously said HELL IS MURKY â

What a pointless film !!â

It