Archive | December 2013
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Kill Your Darlings
Another quick capsule review, and yeah—I kind of enjoyed this one. I’m always somewhat fascinated at the inside look at the lives of the Beat generation poets, and this film gives us fine work from Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Huston as Jack Kerouac and a hilarious Ben Foster as William S. Burroughs. It […]
Museum Hours
Just a quick post about this wonderful 2013 release, because the Holiday Season is still in full throttle around here—and taking up a huge amount of time! If you remember(if you don’t, feel free to look for yourself), the final words on my “About” page here on the blog, specified a goal towards honesty and […]
2013 Theatre in Review
Some quick notes on the five theatre pieces I managed to see in the past calendar year: Best Play Revival…and best show I saw all year-long: the beautiful, haunting new version of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” on Broadway. It’s still playing, so don’t miss it. Best Musical Revival…the wondrous new vision of Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion”, that had a limited […]
Saving Mr. Banks
Alright, first things first…this is not as horrendous as director John Lee Hancock’s “The Blind Side” from 2009. That unwatchable piece of excrement won Sandra Bullock an Oscar, and made a small fortune at the box office. No matter, it’s atrocious. The heartwarming story of a well-to-do white, southern family that took in an African-American giant, […]
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
It’s my hope that I’m not missing the boat on this one in not rating it higher. A lot of it was quite good, and it was never less than compelling. However, with the year-end awards crunch in full-motion, one occasionally slips through the cracks when looking ahead to my 2013 Top Ten tally. What […]
Her
It’s almost inconceivable to me that I’ll experience a finer 2013 film in the coming weeks than “Her”. I went into this already believing director Spike Jonze to be a super-talent, so “Her” most likely being an exceptional movie was a given. But I was unprepared for just how revelatory, and how exquisitely calibrated this motion picture […]
American Hustle
If they handed out awards based on hair, this thing would win boatloads of trophies. Every single headliner in this thing has wild, distracting, outlandish locks. Whether curly, wayward, shellacked—it’s a show in itself. The rest of “American Hustle” is pretty good too. It’s not Top Ten of the year material, but it’s the best […]
Labor Day
“Labor Day”, or “How a late-summer weekend with an escaped-convict murderer saved my mother and provided me with a father-figure so I could grow up to be Spider-Man”. Alright, just being a wise guy with the superhero reference, but Tobey Maguire popping up in the final minutes was surprisingly jarring—if only because I was ignorant […]
Nebraska
It’s a nicely-paced character piece from director Alexander Payne, and I’ll even go as far as calling it a bit of a return to form. I liked 2011’s “The Descendants” well enough, but it did get to be a bit schmaltzy and overbearing at times(ultimately salvaged though by a wonderful turn from George Clooney). “Nebraska” […]
In Praise of Julie Delpy
My memory tells me it was about 22 years ago when I first discovered her, upon the U.S. release of Agnieszka Holland’s “Europa Europa” in 1991. Who was this beguiling, Parisian beauty I wondered. In quick succession, I enjoyed watching her again as the title character in Roger Avary’s “Killing Zoe” from 1993, followed by […]
Reviewed by Mark Leonard 