Writer, film critic, rabid movie lover, record purchaser in the Twin Cities area.
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She-Devil 1989
I like the other two Susan Seidelman movies I’ve seen, Smithereens and Desperately Seeking Susan, but She-Devil is mostly a misfire. Roseanne Barr plays a frumpy housewife who, after her cheating husband (Ed Begley Jr.) leaves her for a rich, beautiful romance novelist (Meryl Streep), decides to wreak vengeance on him and her lover. She-Devil seems to be aiming for a feminist satirical vibe like 9 to 5, but it’s nowhere near as funny and pointed as that movie. It also looks…
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Phenomena 1985
This is my third favorite Argento after Opera and Suspiria. Jennifer Connelly, in a very early performance (she was only 14 when the movie came out), stars as Jennifer, the daughter of a famous American movie star, who is sent to stay at a boarding school in the Swiss countryside where a series of bizarre murders have recently taken place. Jennifer soon realizes that she has a telepathic connection with insects, which help her solve who’s behind the killings.
As…
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Oppenheimer 2023
Full review at matthewcolelevine.substack.com/p/oppenheimer.
In a nutshell: Nolan is not a good filmmaker -- he’s so devoted to plot that he lets theme, emotion, and formal experimentation fall by the wayside. We never get a sense of Oppenheimer (or anyone else) as a flesh-and-blood character, and if the film has a moral point-of-view, it’s so obvious (Oppenheimer was crushed by guilt over what he did and enabled a world of never-ending nuclear stalemate) that it hardly registers as an idea.…
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The Birds 1963
This is my third favorite Hitchcock movie after Rear Window and Vertigo. On the surface, it’s a straightforward adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s short story (even though the film is nothing like the story, which is set in England and concerns a laconic war veteran and his family living in a remote Cornwall cabin). In the film, Tippi Hedren plays Melanie, a spoiled socialite from San Francisco who pursues a handsome man named Mitch (Rod Taylor) to the seaside village…
