Because I Said So

Three Kings, written and directed by David O. Russell begins with a quasi- documentary moment. We see, off in the distance, a soldier with a weapon in his hand waving it aloft — we cannot tell whether it is as a gesture of surrender or threat — as Sgt Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) in full…

[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 16, 2014]

Agnès Jaoui’s terrrific new movie, Look at Me, begins in a taxicab as the passenger (Marilou Berry), attempts to get the surly driver (Jean-Pierre Lazzerini) to turn down the radio so that she can hear what someone is saying to her on her mobile phone. When her father (Jean-Pierre Bacri) gets into the cab, he…

A delightfully profound parable of love lost and found

A star vehicle for Robert Duvall but without much else to recommend it

The Locusts, written and directed by John Patrick Kelley, is a tedious Freudian melodrama which, like so much else that comes out of Hollywood these days, bends every effort to convince us of the awful secrets buried beneath those smiling, happy-families exteriors of the 1950s. Such a belief in the real hideousness of apparent domestic…