Worth Seeing
[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 19, 2012]
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The Winners, a documentary by Paul Cohen, tells the story of four former winners and one third place finisher in the Queen Elizabeth Competition for violinists and pianists in Belgium and what has happened to them since. It is an absorbing but disorganized film that doesn’t quite know what it wants to say, though it…
Denys Arcand’s Decline of the American Empire, a sort of French-Canadian Big Chill, has been given a sequel that far out-classes the original
An ambivalent portrait of Ralph Nader contains a lesson for us all
The Dinner Game, as the untranslatable Dîner de Cons is awkwardly but decorously rendered, is an uproarious French farce by Francis Veber, co-author of La Cage Aux Folles and creator on his own of a number of other plays and films in a similar style. It tells the story of Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte), a…
At the climax of Frequency, directed by Gregory Hoblit from a script by Toby Emmerich., we see both Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid) and his grown son, Johnny, a.k.a. the Chief (Jim Caviezel), fighting with the same man (Shawn Doyle), the sort of policeman-cum-serial killer of a sort that only seems to exist in the movies….
David Mamet’s State and Main is so slow moving, so sluggishly edited, that you’ve got to wonder if it is so through incompetence — though this might be OK for other kinds of films, it’s disastrous in a comedy — or if there is some subtle purpose to it: an attempt to assert, for example,…
