Frozen

Beaumarchais: The Scoundrel, directed by Edouard Molinaro from an unpublished play by Sacha Guitry has a Cyrano-like panache to it and is mostly quite enjoyable—though it is still worth remembering what Fabrice Luchini, in the title role, says to Manuel Blanc, the star-struck young Gudin who complains that the actors are pronouncing his words too…

The Hi Lo Country, based on a novel by Max Evans published in 1961, has a weird period flavor to it even though, as directed by Stephen Frears, it is also very much of the nineties. You can see in it elements of Hemingway’s austere sensualism and bedrock conviction that literary art mainly consists of…

Robert Altman’s new picture, Cookie’s Fortune, is like all his films in having in it a lot of good things pushed to—and usually way beyond—their limit. Here the relentless folksiness of the sleepy Mississippi town, Holly Springs, is truly charming most of the time, but on occasion it becomes almost enough to give Andy Griffith…

An amusing but slight adaptation of a Nick Hornby novel which can laugh at its characters without precluding the possibility that they may laugh at themselves

The ultimate in Civil War re-enactments is, alas, much less successful as a movie.

[Also see discussion in “Entry from July 27, 2011” under “My Diary”] I liked After Life by Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose previous film was Maborosi. It is a witty contribution to the genre that includes Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Stairway to Heaven and so forth, but it gives the bureaucracy of death a peculiarly Japanese look….