Blog

    Break the egg labeled Close Encounters of the Third Kind and break the egg labeled Jane Eyre, and scramble them with some special sauce, and you get Starman […]...

    Not too many movies make you really feel like you’re sweating. Or really crying. Norma Rae (1979, rated PG, 114 minutes) is one of the good ones. It’s […]...

    It’s hard to get past the sterling ability of Ian McKellen to create spectacular life in any character, and the Sherlock Holmes character is fertile ground for McKellen’s […]...

      Louise (Susan Sarandon) and Thelma (Geena Davis) can’t escape from almost every conceivable way of living on the edge. They keep ending up in situations they have […]...

    Sean Connery plays Mulay Achmed Mohammed el-Raisuli, Lord of the Rif and Sultan to the Berbers. In real life the man was Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni (Raisuli) (1871-1925), […]...

    I watched three films based on The Scarlet Letter, the iconic 1850 story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). My small sample (there are at least nine movies based on […]...

    Okay, first things first: the pool table action in The Hustler (1961, not rated, 134 minutes) is rather tame. Most of the shots are obscurely impossible, but successful. […]...

    The tension builds slowly in Old Henry (2021, not rated, 99 minutes) and you may be tempted to stop waiting to find out what it’s all about. Truth […]...

  Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003, rated PG-13, 100 minutes) is historical fiction about Johannes Vermeer’s enigmatic portrait of an unknown young girl, circa 1665. It’s a breathtaking, tantalizing […]...

    Dangerous Liaisons (1988, rated R, 119 minutes) is not a garden of delight.  If you aspire to a working understanding of good and evil, you could do worse […]...

  Atonement is a story of lives of irredeemable sadness. Ian McEwan wrote the book that is faithfully portrayed in this 2007 film (rated R, 123 minutes) it got seven […]...

  This irrepressible, inscrutable movie is about bad people who are sort of really good people, and sort of good people who refuse to let really bad things become their […]...