No filmmaker worth his or her salt would ever say any given film is the “best” they’ve ever seen. They might say this or that film is exceptional or blazing or extra-brilliant, but never “the best of all time”…bullshit.
You can have your little top-ten lists and champion your life-long favorites, but cinema is always shape-shifting…an impermanent feast…and the seas are always surging and receding, not to mention our mood pockets. And if anyone knew that it was Stanley Kubrick.
On top of which AllThatJazz hasn’t aged well. It’s slick and cynical and very inside-baseball, but aimed at the none-too-brights…heavy handed, over-underlined. The “On Broadway” audition sequence is levitational but there’s too much “acting” going on in the second and third acts. Bob Fosse’s ironic points wear you down.
“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,...