dvr this George Cukor directed Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in one of their better romantic comedies, and one of the gayest, in hindsight. Hepburn and Tracy perfected the I-hate-you, I-love-you, We’re-Really-Smart-and-Funny genre, and their chemistry was not just great acting, since they were also in love and having an illicit affair. In Pat and…
I may lose all credibility as a film critic by admitting that I am not much of a Martin Scorsese fan. Aside from The Departed, I’ve never actually enjoyed one of his films, even if I’ve respected them. There’s no doubt that he is a technical genius – his scene settings and camera work are…
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…
dvr this Inarguably one of the great American films of the 1950s, Sweet Smell of Success is also one of the meanest, with zingers as pointed as anything in the other great 1950s films about the desire for fame, All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard. Burt Lancaster plays the malevolent newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker and…
There’s a kind of bait-and-switch going on with the tagline and title of Like Crazy: “I want you – I need you – I love you – I miss you – Like Crazy.” I got the impression, and I think this was the marketer’s goal, that the movie would be about an obsessive love affair…
Writer/director J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 is like a throwback to the days when kids, and adults alike, looked forward to the next summer movie-going event that film auteur Steven Spielberg would unleash upon the masses. So, it should come as no surprise that Spielberg serves as the producer of this homage to days-gone-by; when kids…
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,…
dvr this The film version of Michael Cunningham’s lyrical, moving 1990 novel about a bisexual love triangle set among AIDS and 1980s New York is not nearly as good as the book, but it’s still a damn fine movie. Dallas Roberts, who is now playing the gay brother on The Good Wife, is in love…
dvd of the week One of the better movies of the summer was also its most under-watched. Crazy, Stupid, Love is about the divorce of Steve Carell and Julianne Moore; Carell’s friendship with an expert lothario played by Ryan Gosling and Gosling surprisingly falling in love with Emma Stone. It’s quite funny and enormously insightful…
dvd of the week I don’t think there’s much argument that Captain America: The First Avenger ended up being the best surprise of the summer movie season, at least as far as action films go. As I wrote in the middle of July, “Captain America is the fourth massively expensive comic book superhero movie to…
