Kerry Brown/Roadside Attractions
MOVIE REVIEW
A Most Wanted Man (2014)
Anton Corbijn and John le Carré apparently got on like a house on fire producing “A Most Wanted Man,” but make an odd-couple pairing. The best le Carré adaptations — assuming you buy that films can capture the author’s Olympian monotony of civil-service espionage in the first place — rely on the innate thrill of a great actor in a bad suit retrieving a folder from a cabinet and returning to the desk. Mr. Corbijn likes to film the rites of tradesmen doing their thing, although for the most part seems keener on the poses they strike while doing so than the dirt under their fingernails. Between them, these two not-quite opposing instincts build a reasonable facsimile of the author’s tale, and then pretty much admire each other to a standstill.
Continue reading “Spies Like Them” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Moneyball (2011)
Melinda Sue Gordon/Columbia Pictures
Steven Soderbergh was unceremoniously fired from “Moneyball” about two years ago after revising an alleged grand slam of a screenplay from Steven Zaillian into a quasi-documentary that would devote 10 percent to interviews of real-life figures and another 10 to “reenactments of real events as remembered by the people playing themselves.” Those who read his script confirmed it was that bad, although we’d like to give Mr. Soderbergh the benefit of the doubt after seeing what he did with “Erin Brockovich.” At the very least, this biopic about Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane starring Brad Pitt could have been inspired and fun in Mr. Soderbergh’s hands. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the final score achieved by his late-inning relief, Bennett Miller.
Continue reading “Legends of the Ball” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Pirate Radio (2009)
Alex Bailey/Focus Features
A box office bomb in Britain, “The Boat That Rocked” has been re-titled, re-edited and handed off to Focus Features for its American release. The move is unlikely to help matters. Now known as “Pirate Radio,” Richard Curtis’s tribute to the illegal radio stations that broadcast rock music to Britain in the 1960s functions as no more than a halfhearted collection of scenarios and characters that’d be more at home in a sitcom.
Continue reading “Humor Misses the Boat” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Doubt (2008)
Andrew Schwartz/Miramax Films
John Patrick Shanley plumbs the depths of the soul in “Doubt,” first a play and now a film that confronts the toxicity of the fallacious belief that one’s convictions should never change, no matter the circumstance. It begins with a sermon delivered by Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in which he says that “doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty” and segues into a compelling morality play surrounding that notion. Although the material worked better onstage – Mr. Shanley is a much better writer than he is film director – the big screen version boasts predictably terrific acting by Mr. Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams and all the power and wisdom of its maker’s unique insights into human nature.
Continue reading “Suffer the Children to Come Unto Me” »
Abbot Gensler/Sony Pictures Classics
Not for the fainthearted, the cinema of Charlie Kaufman challenges audiences to consider the multiple cerebral layers that factor into even the most mundane everyday moments, and to process narratives in entirely unexpected fashions. “Synecdoche, New York” – the first movie he’s both written and directed – adheres to that overarching motif, even if it’s otherwise unlike anything anyone’s ever seen.
Continue reading “Confessions of a Delicious Mind” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Abbot Gensler/Sony Pictures Classics
In “Synecdoche, New York,” Charlie Kaufman descends fully, firmly down the rabbit hole, lost in a dense world of complications, confusion and severe ambiguity. Whereas the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and first-time director’s better projects successfully imbue his unique, cerebral vision with a straightforward focus on matters of the heart, this one buries its humanity beneath an avalanche of high concepts. The film is original and well cast, but its insistence on being a sort of cinematic Rorschach test – open to a wide variety of interpretations and meanings – causes it to ultimately leave a rather negligible impact.
Continue reading “And All the People Merely Players” »
