Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (review)
If little girls are perfectly capable of enjoying the adventures of Harry Potter, little boys should be capable to enjoying the adventures of Kit Kittredge…
1930s
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day movie review: girls will be girls
Let’s get one thing straight: Amy Adams is adorable.
King Kong (2005) (review)
Words like ‘meditation’ and ‘contemplation’ may seem inappropriate, at first glance, because the standard hack-movie-critic phrases like ‘roller-coaster ride’ followed by multiple exclamation points don’t even come close to doing justice to the heart-revving adrenaline rush Jackson has crafted. Two words: dino stampede. I probably should have put my head down between my knees and taken a series of long, deep breaths to recover from that early Skull Island setpiece, except it would have meant taking my eyes from the screen, and there was no way in hell I could have done that.
Road to Perdition movie review: pulp fiction
There’s not a thing that isn’t hauntingly, quietly electrifying about this, the first truly grown-up comic book movie. Fans of the medium have known for years that the form had no trouble being Important, but the film industry (though perhaps not all filmmakers themselves) has stubbornly insisted on treating comic adaptations as juvenile.
Gosford Park (review)
Robert Altman’s latest saga is a sprawling yet intimate upstairs/downstairs murder mystery set at a shooting party at an English manor in 1932, a story much concerned with subtle class warfare and how very nasty very proper people can be. But don’t see it for that. See it for the catty gossip, the cheap rich … more…
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (review)
So what the Coens did with O Brother, Where Art Thou? is this: They transported Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey to this filmic otherworld of theirs, turning what is perhaps the original on-the-road story into a Depression-era fantasia that wants more for you to recognize the clever fun they’re having with filmmaking conventions of the 1930s than whether you know the least thing about ancient literature.
The Sting (review)
The Sting is pretty universally acknowledged as one of the best films ever made. From the flawless performances all round to the clever script, this is movie magic that approaches a kind of wizardry. Not a note is out of place — every line, every scene builds on what’s come before until it ends so breathlessly and abruptly that it leaves you astounded at its audacity. Lonnegan’s not the only one who gets conned; writer David S. Ward and director George Roy Hill sting the viewer, too. This is just about as perfect as movies come.
The Sound of Music (review)
How can you tell The Sound of Music is a fantasy? Forget that it’s based on a true story. The fantasy tip-off is this: Julie Andrews plays a nun. The radiant and sweetly sexy Andrews, not that she isn’t delightful in the role, is about as believable as a nun as, say, Mel Gibson would be as the Pope.
