When I was a teenager, I found great joy in Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. And even then, I was a budding movie critic, so I knew, more or less, that my joy was not based in some aesthetic appreciation of his acting, or the film’s surrounding, or even in the often great special effects that would…
When you were born, your parents counted your fingers and toes. They lovingly stroked your baby-soft skin, checked to make sure all parts were present and accounted for, then they looked into your face and wondered what might become of you someday. They never asked for a refund because of your hair (or lack thereof)….
dvd of the week The second animated film by Tim Burton to be nominated for an Oscar, Frankenweenie has more flashes of brilliance in it than anything he has done in more than a decade. It is the story of a strange, nerdy boy – both a budding filmmaker and a genius scientist – who…
dvr this Starz, Friday, Jan. 25, 10 p.m. The Starz show about mostly naked muscle men killing each other and having sex with each other and many of the women they come into contact with is loosely based on the actual Roman slave rebellion during the first century B.C. It’s astonishingly violent and the sex…
thursday, jan. 24 Leading Ladies Ken Ludwig’s new comedy centers on two young English Shakespearean actors who are so broke that they are performing their Shakespearean shows at Moose Lodges in Amish country. When they hear about an elderly lady about to die, leaving her fortune to her long-lost English nephews, the actors decide to…
People complained that free blacks were given short shrift in Lincoln; that the Canadians had more involvement in the escape from Iran that was depicted in Argo; that Alfred wasn’t as cartoonish as he was shown in Hitchcock and torture was over-emphasized in Zero Dark Thirty. But so far, there hasn’t been too much buzz…
dvd of the week The second season of that other musical on TV starts Feb. 6, which should give you enough time to catch up by watching the first 15 episodes. Like Glee, Smash is amazingly uneven, occasionally sublime, but mostly fascinatingly bad. The story of the making of a Broadway musical about the life…
dvr this Turner Classic Movies 2:15 p.m., Tuesday, Jan. 22 One of my favorite movies, Rebecca is romantic, creepy, thrilling and among the most beautifully shot films ever made. It is based on the Daphne du Maurier novel about a young woman who marries a widower and is haunted by his past, his housekeeper and…
thursday, jan. 17 Pygmalion Renowned director Nicholas Martin returns to the Globe to direct George Bernard Shaw’s most popular modern masterpiece (which Lerner and Loewe adapted as the musical My Fair Lady ). The poor flower-seller Eliza Doolittle is in the right place at the right time, just as speech professor Henry Higgins makes a…
Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s masterful movie about the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden, arrived in San Diego’s theaters Jan. 4 with more baggage than any film in recent memory. It was shown to critics at the beginning of December and they went on to give it award after award. Then various…
