reviews by year

You’ve probably heard more about *Venus* than its limited, under-the-radar release would seem to have warranted. It’s the movie that earned star Peter O’Toole his eighth Academy Award nomination. It’s the movie about a May-December romance between a dirty old man and a tough twentysomething chick. It’s a celebration of old age; it’s a vindication of spunky youth; it’s this; it’s that.

Twenty-three reversed is 32, and 3 minus 2 is 1, which how many stars I’d give ‘The Number 23’ if I gave stars, which I don’t. And that one star is dedicated purely to Jim Carrey and his rangy, ragged, totally fascinating performance as an actor on the precipice of his career– I mean, a man on the precipice of madness.

If you’re like most people, you’ve been asking yourself for several years now, ‘Just who the hell is Sienna Miller, why is she famous, and why must I endure the latest gossip about her?’

Oh, devastating, *devastating* and lovely and bittersweet and entirely wonderful, this enchantingly old-fashioned movie about the power of friendship and imagination and art and learning and expanding one’s horizons.

This is one smart thriller: it lets you draw your own conclusions, assumes you’re connected enough to current events to understand the context in which it occurs — no, actually, it *requires* that you’re connected in order to get the full brunt of the anxiety and dread bubbling under its surface.

So, this Hannibal Lecter Babies movies, it’s mostly just boring, and in the rare few moments when it isn’t boring, the rare few moments when it dares to be even the slightest bit adventurous, it’s either risible or reprehensible. It takes one of the greatest boogeymen in the history of cinema and turns him into a comic book villain. Oh, and it’s ridiculously banal, to boot.

It had me at hello, did the surburban satire *Little Children,* and kept me for a long time, and then lost me in its final moments. If ever that dictum about an ending making or breaking a film were true, it’s here — I can’t remember the last time my impression of a movie was so dramatically altered by how it wrapped up.

Okay, let’s be clear: it’s the impact of this death on a range of *women* that Moncrieff is concerned with, the kind of women whose stories are also typically untold, unheard, ignored.

It’s not too often that I have to stifle a genuine urge to scream at a movie screen, but it was through gritted teeth that I sat through this trite, manipulative, excruciating nightmare of female pyschosis and idiocy presented as feminine adorableness.

Boo? Bah.