The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (review)
There’s retro, and then there’s better left safely in the past.
based on a play
Nine (review)
Actual Italian movies too inscrutable for ya? Don’t like reading subtitles? Hate that stodgy, old-fashioned black-and-white cinematography? Never fear! You can now have the flavor of Italian cinema without any of the fuss or mess! Just try *Nine* for that authentic faux cinema Italiano experience.
Easy Virtue (review)
If Noel Coward had written *Meet the Parents,* it might look something like this: witty and wise and totally lacking in poop jokes.
Frost/Nixon (review)
This was the sort of hopeless dread the news that Ron Howard was directing this left me with. I felt like Robert Stack in *Airplane!*: ‘It’s a goddamn waste of time — there’s no way he can land this plane!’
Good (review)
No actor has ever looked less comfortable in a Nazi uniform than Viggo Mortensen does…
Doubt (review)
Passionate performances aside, there’s an odd dispassion to this stage-to-screen adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name.
Mamma Mia! movie review: out of tune
If there’s one thing that’s clear from this revue of ABBA’s hit songs, it’s that there really aren’t all that many great ABBA songs, hits or no.
Diary of a Mad Black Woman (review)
It’s kindness, at first, that leads you to suspect that someone is pulling our collective leg with *Diary of a Mad Black Woman,* because surely anything this jaw-droppingly awful must be a joke. Surely this is not being proffered with any genuine intention of it being seen as, well, an actual *movie,* with a plot and characters and scenes that connect in some reasonably logical sense. This *must* be a *MAD TV* sketch that went horribly wrong and escaped into the wild where it turned feral. Right?
Chicago (review)
Their *Chicago* — based on the stage musical by John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse — is utterly singable, danceable, cheerable, with musical numbers that straddle the unwillingness of today’s movie audiences to suspend our disbelief about movie characters breaking into song unless they’re Disney lions or talking candelabra.
Driving Miss Daisy (review)
Atlantan Miss Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy) is a ‘fine, rich, Jewish lady,’ says her black chauffeur, Hoke Coburn (Morgan Freeman). Driving Miss Daisy is the bittersweet drama about the unspoken friendship between this unlikely pair over a quarter of a century, from 1948 to 1973.
