Movie Reviews

In Brief: Yeah, it's the film that gave us the song "White Christmas" (and inadvertently launched a hotel chain), but Mark Sanrich's richly entertaining Holiday Inn (1942) is the movie equivalent of a one-size-fits-all greeting card for just about every holiday to come down the pike. We get Christmas, New Year's Eve, Lincoln's birthday, Valentine's Day, Washington's birthday,…

The Story: Musical revisionist take on classic fairy tales. The Lowdown: It ought to be more of an event than it is, but this film version of the Stephen Sondheim show is good and ought to please the fans.

In Brief: John Ford’s Donovan’s Reef (1963) is a bona fide Christmas movie if ever there was one — but with the unusual setting of a South Seas island (played by Kauai, Hawaii, with studio work at Paramount in Hollywood). The truth is that while this is housed in a John Wayne vehicle in the John Ford barroom brawling mode,…

In Brief: Yojimbo (1961) is one of Akira Kurosawa’s most entertaining films — and it was his biggest hit in Japan. I suppose you could say that’s because it’s one of his most accessible, though how a dark-humored Japanese Western based on an American hard-boiled crime novel became accessible is something of a puzzlement. Nonetheless,…

In Brief: Somewhere between a really creepy mystery and a prestige picture, Stuart Walker’s Mystery of Edwin Drood was an attempt to match Walker’s film of Great Expectations (1934), and it is a part of the little known director’s best works that also included The Eagle and the Hawk (1933) and Werewolf of London (1935). Universal took Charles Dickens’ final — and unfinished…

The Story: Fact-based story of Cheryl Strayed, based on her memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.  The Lowdown: A strong performance from Reese Witherspoon, a solid screenplay by Nick Hornby and assuredly creative direction by Jean-Marc Vallée make Wild a very good movie indeed.

The Story: A comedian and actor — who’s trying his best to be taken as a serious artist — spends the day with a New York Times reporter on the weekend of his wedding to a reality star and the opening of his new, big film. The Lowdown: While it takes its time to get…

The Story: The story of Moses with CGI.  The Lowdown: Theologically dubious, dramatically inert and just plain boring even with all its state-of-the-art effects. And it goes on for two-and-a-half very long hours.

The Story: A single mother and her son are plagued by a mysterious creature known as Mr. Babadook.  The Lowdown: An absolutely superb horror film that is actually a good bit more than a horror film. Done in a classical formal style, it may remind you of Kubrick's The Shining and the best of Polanski's…

In Brief: As it turned out, Il Grido (1957) marked the end of Michelangelo Antonioni's neorealist period. When he returned in 1960 with L'Avventura, he had pretty completely transformed himself into the introspective, artier, more impenetrable filmmaker we think of as Antonioni. It is perhaps not surprising since that was the same year that Fellini…

In Brief: Though Kurt Neumann's Secret of the Blue Room was a hardy — and well-loved — staple of the old Shock Theater TV package, it's really more of an old dark house mystery than an outright horror film. (That's only reasonable, I suppose, since it's partly made on redressed sets from James Whale's 1932 The Old Dark…

The Story:  A self-sufficient frontier woman and the claim-jumper whose life she saves undertake transporting three dangerously unbalanced women back east. The Lowdown: A beautifully made and acted revisionist western — leavened with dark humor — that proves to be one of the year's most compelling films.

In Brief: It's become something of a Christmas staple now, but The Lemon Drop Kid was originally not well-received. Why? Well, it's a Christmas movie that came out in April — and it was all Bob Hope's fault. When he saw the finished film — intended for Christmas 1950 — he thought it was weak and needed…

The Story: Marital drama about what happens in the wake of a threat where the husband shows himself to be less than his wife assumed. The Lowdown: The critics are mostly agreed that this Swedish drama about marital discord and patriarchal dysfunction is great stuff — Sweden has chosen it as its Oscar entry. Maybe…

In Brief: Ousmane Sembene’s Mandabi (The Money Order) (1968) is the sort of movie that is much prized by folks suffering from cultural inferiority complexes and by those who dote on the esoteric for its own sake. It’s a movie from Senegal — and is apparently notable for being shot in Wolof (the common language)…

The Story: The three best friends at the center of Horrible Bosses are screwed out of a business deal and concoct a kidnapping plan to save themselves. The Lowdown: A generally entertaining — if none too spectacular — comedy with a few clever bits that’s held up by its cast.

In Brief: Before the arrival of George Romero’s reinvention of the zombie movie with Night of the Living Dead (1968), schlockmeister Edward L. Cahn’s Zombies of Mora Tau — made for even schlockier producer Sam Katzman — was pretty much the foundation of the zombie sub-genre for an entire generation of horror fans. Oh, it…

The Story: The Madagascar penguins get a movie of their own in which they match wits with a villainous octopus. The Lowdown: Breakneck paced, filled with rapid-fire gags and wordplay that are impossible to keep up with and blessed with a pleasing lunacy, Penguins of Madagascar mostly works but goes on a little too long.

In Brief: The Asheville Film Society eases into the Christmas season with Life Begins at Eight-Thirty — a film I’m pretty sure most of you have never heard of. It’s something I bumped into about 45 years ago on a long-defunct TV station that kept going by booking generally obscure movies and 1950s TV shows.…

In Brief: George Arliss — in his final Hollywood movie — takes on Cardinal Richelieu, and the results are more or less what you expect. In his version of Cardinal Richelieu (1935), the old boy is just as wily as the real one, but he's now become the wily hero of the story. In other…

In Brief: Some movies are leisurely paced. Some are deliberately paced. Still others are glacially paced. They all are on the slow side — in varying degrees. Depending on where you land in it, Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997) covers all the bases of slowness. And yet, I have to admit that it held…