dvd of the week Meryl Streep finally won her third Oscar for her brilliant portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Some people thought she was great and the movie wasn’t, but I loved the whole thing. Told in flashbacks from the perspective of an elderly Thatcher heading into the dementia from which the…
dvd of the week Alexander Payne won another Oscar for his screenplay to this low-key dramedy about a man dealing with finding out that his comatose wife cheated on him, their problematic children, and a large family squabble about what to do with a huge track of Hawaiian land they inherited. George Clooney is more…
One the most underrated and underwatched movies of 2012, Tintin probably suffered from fear of the “uncanny valley,” the creepy name for the creepy feeling we get when CGI humans look too real. It initially unnerved me, too, but my love for Hergé’s original comic books about a young investigative journalist, his terrier Snowy,…
dvd of the week Like Crazy is a naturalistic romance about two young people in love who behave like young people in love. There’s nothing crazy about them or the movie. That it’s still so successful, so entertaining and moving, despite being so honest and realistic, is a testament to the skills of director Drake…
dvd of the week On my favorite movies list of 2011, Moneyball manages to make baseball statistics dramatic and funny. Bennett Miller’s crafty use of slow motion, muted colors and slyly gorgeous cinematography creates an epic grandeur for what is really a story of office politics. He and the screenwriters use American audiences’ sentimentality about…
dvd of the week One of the great surprises of last summer, the mixed martial arts drama Warrior has a somewhat hard-to-believe plot, but that is subsumed by the intensity and authenticity of the performances and the scenes in the cage. Inception’s Tom Hardy seems to be channeling some cross between Rocky-era Sylvester Stallone and…
dvd of the week Woody Allen has been hit or miss over the last decade or so, but his latest film, Midnight in Paris, is one of the good ones; a delightful, fantastical comedy about what happens when one of your greatest dreams comes true. As in most of Allen’s comedies, if Allen isn’t the…
dvd of the week If your jaw dropped at how realistic, how life-like and creepy Gollum was when you first saw him in The Fellowship of the Ring ten years ago, it will fall open again and your mouth will dry out when you see Caesar, the super smart chimpanzee at the center of Rise…
dvd of the week I must admit that I walked into The Help expecting to be offended. Because I knew it to be about a young white woman writing a book about the black maids in early 1960s Jackson, Miss., perhaps unfairly I expected it to be a prequel of sorts to the insidiously racist…
dvd of the week Paul Rudd has been in a string of broad, absurd comedies over the last five years that have made him a star but which have not been remotely insightful. Our Idiot Brother does not have the depth of a good Woody Allen or the painfully strong laughs of Judd Apatow’s best,…
