Love Is Strange Movie Review

What a beautiful little movie Ira Sachs made with Love Is Strange. Alfred Molina and John Lithgow play George and Ben, a same sex couple who get married (thanks to a change in New York law) after almost forty years together as partners. George, who works as a music educator in a private Catholic school, is fired for not upholding the values of the Church. Essentially, his marriage stands in conflict with the public image of the Church. The decision is not unlike any company firing someone for publicly engaging in a behavior that reflects poorly on company values. However, his colleagues and most of his students and their parents knew he was gay and lived with Ben.

The World According to Garp Movie Review

I have so many memories from my childhood of my mother watching The World According to Garp that I think there must have been a stretch of time when it was on TV nearly every day. I thought it a bizarre movie then and I find it a bizarre movie now. George Roy Hill directed this adaptation of John Irving’s novel, which I’ve never read. But I won’t let that prevent me from speculating on something I’d be willing to bet the book does that the movie fails to.

This Is 40 Movie Review

The Judd Apatow brand of comedy has dominated the genre for the better part of the last ten years. His influence extends far beyond the handful of films he’s directed himself into a host of other films that he’s also produced, many of them featuring actors he’s fond of using in his own films. His films don’t go for the simple gross-out and zany laughs of the Farrelly brothers. They rarely rely on shock value. They’re more like situational comedy with believable situations, unlike what you get from your average popular TV sitcom. His writing is often insightful, replete with astute observations of human behavior, even if it’s usually from the eccentric limit of the spectrum. In his latest (only his fourth as writer and director) film, This Is 40, he returns to peripheral characters created for his 2007 comedy Knocked Up, crafting a story around a married couple with two daughters and their attempts to deal with their changing lives as they reach middle age.

25 Years Ago This Month: June 1987

Kevin Costner got his big starring break in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, written by playwright David Mamet, whose own directorial debut came the same year. Sean Connery won an Oscar for playing sidekick and mentor to Costner's Eliot Ness. Andy Garcia makes one of his earliest screen appearances.

Harry and the Hendersons was a beloved little family film most of us probably remember fondly. John Lithgow is the head of a family that hits a sasquatch with his car while on a camping trip (?) and then takes the man-bear-gorilla home for a bit of light family entertainment/comedy/moralizing. Kevin Peter Hall, who played Harry, is otherwise best known for playing the Predator in both Predator and Predator 2.

Speaking of which, Predator was released the same month! Now this is a movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger (aka former California governor) gets called in for a Central American jungle mission with his elite group of commandos that includes Carl Weathers (aka Apollo Creed), Jesse "The Body" Ventura (aka former Minnesota governor), and Lethal Weapon scribe Shane Black. Then they get eliminated one-by-one at the hands of a technologically advanced alien creature. Schwarzenegger faces him mano a mano in the finale. Classic!

Rise of the Planet of the Apes Movie Review: You Blew It Up! Damn You to Hell!

For the life of me I can’t understand why critics have been heaping praise on Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Are our standards and expectations for big-budget studio productions so low that as long as it’s not a documentary about idiots falling down we think it’s good? Have we come this far and sunk so low? Really, I don’t see what there is to appreciate in this sub-par CGI-enhanced non-spectacle that completely fails to grasp any of the subtlety or even the humor of Planet of the Apes.

Shrek Movie Review: The One that Started it All

This review was written in 2001 shortly after the release of Shrek. This is the first time it is being published.

It's quite remarkable that the recent advent of computer animated feature films has produced some excellent movies. Disney and Pixar started it with the two Toy Story films and A Bug's Life and now Dreamworks has picked it up with Shrek, the story of an ogre who goes on a quest to rescue a beautiful princess so that the Napoleonic Lord Farquaad (say it out loud) can marry her and become king. Not only is Shrek the next in a line of films that look fantastic, but, like its predecessors, has an engaging storyline.