Deserved every reward it got and more. I'd love it if its success led to a Cinematic Universe, with films about Richard Feynman, about Niels Bohr, about Boris Pash and the rest of the Bastard Brigade, etc. A girl can hope.
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Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry 1976
"My first murder was committed in a windmill."
I watched this film in between my first reading of Lowry's acclaimed novel, Under the Volcano, and my second viewing of John Huston's beautiful but sanitized film adaptation (which I'd first seen in the 80s when it was new but most of it went over my barely teenaged head). I think this was an ideal experience if one is going to do Lowry. The dramatic film is much enhanced by the double…
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Rubikon 2022
This is a solid sci-fi outing that occasionally went stolid but it gets an extra half-star for turning an entire space station into a gigantic orbital pregnancy test. It could have gone a lot of stupid ways but didn't; it could have gone smarter and really chewed on the ethical dilemma posed by its scenario but didn't push that angle as far as it maybe should have. Three very solid performances and good use of a limited space and (likely) budget. I'll watch it again sometime.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022
I am the bullseye at the center of this film's target audience. And it hit me.
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Chéri 2009
Having just recently read both books (Chéri and The End of Chéri) I'm mad at the short shrift the second book got, in which Edmée actually becomes a person and kicks ass and Lea gets comfortably old and fat and is having a fine time and makes only very gentle fun of war veteran Chéri being mad that she built a life without him. But I knew when I saw Michele Pfeiffer as Lea that we were not going to…
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Cyrano 2021
I never thought anyone could replace Steve Martin in this role but Peter Dinklage is at least his equal. But while Kelvin Harrison is as pretty as Rick Rossovich, he is nowhere near convincingly dim enough to fill Rick's bunker gear. But that's this film in a nutshell; very, very pretty but apart from Dinklage, kind of empty (except for that one song). Fortunately Dinklage is so unbelievably perfect he saves the whole thing. He is our density.
And he definitely, in real life, has the right wife (original script writer Erica Schmidt). She wrote him the best possible showcase.