Worth Seeing
[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 25, 2013]
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What makes Tim Story’s film so good as moral instruction is what makes it, um, not quite so good as a movie.
I’m Not Rappaport, written and directed by Herb Gardner from his stage play, takes its title from the old vaudeville joke. Comic walks across the stage as it were down a street and encounters straight man with surprise: “Rappaport! What happened to you?” he says. “You used to be a short, fat man and now…
What I liked about Pollock, directed by and starring Ed Harris, is that it really does convey an impression of what a nasty man Jackson Pollock must have been—not, that is, nasty in the mealy-mouthed, surreptitious, hypocritical way that people are generally nasty these days but nasty in that old-fashioned, full-bore, unashamed way that people…
Love is the Devil written and directed by John Maybury, stars Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon, the pioneer of the skull-beneath-the-skin school of British art. Because he was forbidden by keepers of the Bacon artistic estate to show actual Bacon canvases on screen, Maybury, who is himself a painter, has had to confine himself to…
It is, I believe, always a mistake to criticize a movie for not being the book it is based on—or, indeed, for not being anything at all. Every artist deserves the courtesy of being assessed on the basis of what he tried to do and not on that of what he didn’t try to do….
Double Jeopardy, directed by Bruce Beresford, is the latest example of what is coming to be one of Hollywood’s favorite new genres: the female paranoia movie. Like The Astronaut’s Wife of a few weeks ago, it deliberately sets out to exploit the sort of insecurity that has become endemic, in some ways the most destructive…
