Ever since Sam Kinison used the term “courtesy laugh,” I’ve been careful to keep track of films that actually deliver at least a little honest comedy, and while Theodore Melfi’s St. Vincent isn’t fall on the floor stuff, there’s something sweet and honest about the thing. In the grumpy-old-man, get-off-my-lawn category this delivers. I find myself..
Search results for: review
Drinking Buddies (2013) Kate (Olivia Wild) is what you might call the hospitality girl for a brand new Chicago brewery. She introduces the brew to bar and restaurant owners, and she’s the prettiest, and only, girl in the small company’s employ. She dates music producer Chris (Ron Livingston, Band of Brothers), and this relationship appears..
The Undateable We don’t come by honesty naturally. If we aren’t born liars, we learn exactly what people want to hear very early on, and we spend much of our lives floating partial truth trial balloons. If our friends and loved ones shoot those down, we go back to managing our fictional version of self…
Something is wrong with me. I liked all of these films. Mini-Reviews: Angels’ Share • Red Corner • Eden Angels’ Share (2012) It bothers me that Netflix doesn’t have a “UK Tall Tales from the Pub” category. You know: Waking Ned Devine, Brassed Off, The Stone of Destiny. I just love this stuff — Jolly old..
Stolen Lives (2009) If the people who make Hallmark television movies ever decided to spice things up with a lingering, forensic eye on dead bodies and a little Morena Baccarin porch humping, it might look something like this curiously lifeless crime drama, which really should have its own caution tape wrapped around it. It features a..
Wish You Were Here (2012) I have a weakness for movies about western couples who visit some exotic third world hell hole and wonder what in the world they were thinking when they planned the trip. Moral of the story: stay away from Cambodia. This was extremely well executed, with incredible performances by Joel Edgerton..
Some films almost feel as though they deserve a workshop over a review, and Touchy Feely–with its invitation to participate in painfully awkward, claustrophobic family conversations and vast stretches of unexplained premise–certainly qualifies. You don’t wait 20 minutes to understand the story here. You get to wait forever. Directed by Lynn Shelton, Rosemary DeWitt..
..and mistaking them for people.. A “cog,” they tell us, is a motion-transferring wheel with sprockets along its edge. A collection of them, engineered and assembled, as in a Swiss watch, can be so beautiful to behold that some designers have taken to leaving the whole assembly visible to the eye. It’s reassuring to ponder..
Pure Misinformation The white-hot, laser-bright line between abject fear and totalitarianism was hugely on display, yesterday, in the Supreme Court’s hearing of a case calling into question the Biden administration’s OSHA vaccine mandate. I’m not a lawyer, nor even a student of the court, but I’ve read enough court transcripts to register, with high alarm,..
Dazed and Confused Since the outbreak of Covid in March of 2020 — twenty-two months now — I continue to make this sad confession: “I still have no idea what is going on.” I am not, of course, talking about the obvious contours of the crisis. A dangerous virus is getting people sick and killing..