Until last week, the only movie I’d seen that consisted of nothing but one long conversation was My Dinner With Andre, which I saw forty years ago. But this past Thursday I watched a movie made in 2007 called The Man from Earth. . . . If you liked The Twilight Zone, you’ll probably enjoy this movie. . .
Category: Movies
Wonder Woman 1984 Disappoints
I loved the movie Wonder Woman when it came out three years ago and was expecting to like the sequel, which debuted Christmas Day on HBO Max. I wanted to like it. When I saw the headline of Manohla Dargis’s review in the New York Times, “She’s Still Big, It’s the Script That Got Small,” I refused to read it. I didn’t want Ms. Dargis planting negative perceptions in my head before I’d seen the film. . . .
Shimmer Lake
Writing yesterday about the movie Small Town Crime, which I had just seen the night before, reminded me of another movie about a crime in a small town and the efforts by law enforcement and other interested parties to solve it. This one I saw almost exactly a year ago on Netflix’s streaming service. I just checked and it’s still there. It’s called Shimmer Lake. . . .
Small Town Crime
I’m a fan of a particular type of low-budget movie, the kind we would have once called “direct-to-DVD,” but today might better be described as “straight-to-streaming.” These movies often feature a well-known actor in the lead role (about 50% of the time, it seems, this is Bruce Willis) surrounded by actors you’ve never heard of. But occasionally that formula is reversed: a relatively obscure actor plays the lead while at least some of the lesser parts are played by actors who are better known. Many of these low-budget movies are espionage thrillers featuring lots of car chases, fight scenes, and gunplay. But the ones I usually like best are less frenetic and more plausible. They are often stories about a crime and the pursuit of justice in some small American town. . . .
Saving Private Ryan
Given that I’ve seen a lot of movies, it has always seemed odd that I’d never seen Saving Private Ryan. I decided a few months ago that it was high time to redress that gap in my cinematic exposure so I added the movie to my Netflix DVD queue. It arrived a few weeks ago and then just sat on a table near the television. . . .
The Social Dilemma
I just finished watching a documentary called The Social Dilemma on Netflix. (Thanks to my friend Kevin for recommending it.) The movie is horrifying, and I think everyone should watch it. The movie asks and answers the question, What’s the problem with social media? I haven’t been a fan of social media for years. The algorithms behind it are designed to literally addict people to their screens, thereby wasting their time, diminishing the quality of their lives, and harming their relationships. It serves up distortions and outright lies, keeps people in their media echo chambers, and fosters divisiveness. But I didn’t appreciate just how dangerous it really is before watching this film. . . .
A Man Called Ove
I watched this movie last week and was really taken by it. It’s in Swedish, and while I sometimes find watching a movie with subtitles off-putting, I didn’t have a problem with it in this case. The protagonist, Ove, is a cranky, isolated retiree who spends his days enforcing the rules of his neighborhood association…
The Making of 1917
Last week my wife and I watched Sam Mendes’s 2019 Oscar-nominated film 1917. It was compelling and gripping, as much a race-against-the-clock thriller as a war movie, and it was a top-notch film by any measure — story, performances, cinematography. But what made it ground-breaking was its presentation as a single, two-hour-long tracking shot . . .