There are many, I presume, who will agree with my praise of that killer suspense sequence at the end of Act Two in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter, but now I know New Yorker critic Anthony Lane is one of them. Here’s the passage from Lane’s current review: “Still, to be fair, there is one part of The Interpreter that would, without question, have earned [Alfred Hitchcock’s] smile. All the characters are in different places — one agent is following Silvia, another is tailing a Matoban suspect, and Woods and Keller are in a booby-trapped room. (Catherine Keener, by far the driest deliverer of lines in the movie, looks up at an overhead light strung with explosives and says, ‘Now, that’s just rude.’ Imagine Celeste Holm packing heat, and you’re there.) Gradually, Pollack pulls the figures together, [Sean Penn] starts to yell into his phone, and calamity opens its maw. It is one of the smartest passages of action, allegro sostenuto, that I have seen for a long while — as neat, indeed, as the infamous bomb-on-a-bus sequence from Hitchcock’s Sabotage, and true to his faith in the revelatory powers of excitement, in what it means to have movies burst against our nerves.”

“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting. I was told...
I finally saw Walter Salles' I'm Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It's obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination. But as good as it basically is...
After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing. All I can say is, it...
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall's Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year's Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander -- a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it's doing and ends sublimely. Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on...
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when and how did Martin Lawrence become Oliver Hardy? He’s funny in that bug-eyed, space-cadet way… 7:55 pm: And now it’s all cartel bad guys, ice-cold vibes, hard bullets, bad business,...

The Kamala surge is, I believe, mainly about two things — (a) people feeling lit up or joyful about being...
Unless Part Two of Kevin Costner's Horizon (Warner Bros., 8.16) somehow improves upon the sluggish initial installment and delivers something...
For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg's tastiest and wickedest film -- intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...