The Boatman is a Western, but it’s unlike any other Western you’ve had seen. It’s set in modern times, so it belongs in the Contemporary Western genre with such films as No Country for Old Men, Brokeback Mountain, and last year’s Wind River. Unlike those movies, though, The Boatman is a low-budget independent film...
Every summer, the Pommeroys vacationed at Laud’s Head, their vacation home on one of the Massachusetts islands, but this year would be more special, because Lawrence, who rarely came to these reunions, was bringing his wife and two kids. The other three siblings–Diana, Chaddy, and the first-person narrator (who’s never named)–looked forward to seeing...
Holly Golightly as a name is ironic, because everywhere she goes, she goes loudly. She’s a seeker with only a vague idea of what she hopes to find. She’s also a runaway with a clear understanding of what she’s fleeing. She might not know where she’s going to, but she knows where she’s been,...
Directed and written by Terrence Malick, 2017’s Song to Song is an experimental film. If you take one thing away from this review, take that. It’s an experiment, and with any artistic experiment, you, the viewer, will either love it or hate it, think it’s innovative and fresh or think it a waste of...
I missed the opening crawl, because some idiot stepped in front of me during it–not once, but twice. I lost my place the first time, and just as I was finding it, he cut in front of me again. And stood there! By the time he moved on, the crawl was over. I hear...
Netflix has changed their rating system, so instead of rating a movie on a scale of 1-to-5 stars, I must decide a thumb up or down. That works well for movies that I really love or for movies I really hate, but what about movies that I don’t hate enough to regret watching but...
The opening credits justified the admission dollars. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, because who comes just to see the opening credits? But I went to a matinee and received an early bird discount, so there were fewer dollars to justify before I felt I got my money’s worth. As Sigrid sings “Everybody Knows,”...
The Nook, Barnes and Noble e-reader, lacks the same cachet as Amazon’s Kindle, but it has at least one noteworthy feature that makes it the right reader in a specific situation. That situation is when you’re visiting a Barnes and Noble store. While at the store, you can connect to their WiFi and read...
My movie reviews tend to come in three flavors: positive, negative, and neutral. Or in hand symbols: thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or the ambivalent hand wiggle people do to show something is so-so. I’ll give Murder on the Orient Express that hand wiggle to show that it’s so-so, but unlike my other neutral reviews, I have...
The 1977 Italian movie Suspiria is a masterpiece of Eurohorror. I’m don’t recall where I read that quotation, and I won’t even swear under oath that I’m remembering it verbatim, but I remember the word masterpiece, and I remember Eurohorror, because it’s the first time I’ve seen the word. What I didn’t remember, until...
