New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Fright Night: Colin Farrell and David Tennant are both having way too much fun here and it's hard for some of that not carry over to the audience. Was surprised at how early the narrative starts rolling and how it barely pauses to breathe after the first 8 minutes. Enjoyable but not enough comedy or horror for me.

It's Always Fair Weather: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's followup to Singin' in The Rain and a very iconoclastic musical at that. It's cynical and although it wrings a happy ending out by the final fade, it also does its best to hold it off for as long as possible. There's a musical number in thought bubbles, another in triptych, and two delightful sequences where Cyd Charisse dances with a gymful of broken-nosed pugilists, and Kelly tap dances on roller skates. Like all the musicals I love, it makes my heart beat as fast as any well-choreographed action scene.

And in theaters: I saw A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas and am happy to report that all the usual noses were tweaked, stereotypes reinforced and mocked, and that it did a great job of reinforcing the ridiculousness of nearly all of the 3D films that have been released in the last several years.

Max Braden: I just rented One Day, which was boring, predictable, and offensive. I hated Hathaway's character, and if I'm going to hear a dialect tour of the British Isles, I'd rather have Michael Caine do it.

Albert Nobbs was like Remains of the Day meets Brokeback Mountain. I was only vaguely aware of Janet McTeer going into the movie. Coming out, I think she's my favorite supporting actress performance of the year.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is one of those movies that I think looks interesting in release, but pass up, and regret it later. The upside of the documentary is the amazing artwork itself. These are drawings thousands of years before Perspective was developed, and I couldn't see a draft/touchup *anywhere*. It's amazing. The downside is that Herzog gets all touchy feeling and assumes all this mystic interpretation. You can just as well enjoy the film on mute.

Margin Call reminded me of David Mamet movies like The Spanish Prisoner, where there characters talk up how big something is to give you the impression that it's very important, without ever showing it to you. And that the setting is so insular it could have been filmed on a single stage without props or backdrops. I dislike both of those things in movies. Irons also plays a caricature of a dim-but-intimidating one-percenter. There may be plenty of congressional testimony to indicate that that's not far from the truth, but it comes across as too on the nose in this movie. The documentaries Inside Job and I.O.U.S.A are far more riveting depictions of the financial crisis.

Samuel Hoelker:

Albert Nobbs: My God, after ten years of trying to get this movie made, THIS is the movie they get out of it? It reminds me of Blue Valentine - 35 rewrites and the screenplay is still terrible. Albert Nobbs is exactly what you'd expect in a period piece (slow, boring, etc), but gets the extra layer of incompetency on top of it. It's so unintentionally hilarious, helped out by Glenn Close's performance that's so incredibly earnest (which is not the same as good). She puts her heart into this performance, but her heart doesn't realize that it would be impossible to look at her as a man. And her character is so childish and, well, stupid, that it's hard to really sympathize with her, since the film doesn't believe that she is. Oh, but Janet McTeer's good.

Continued:       1       2       3       4       5