Tag Archives: American cinema

my best laughs in a while (Film: Game Night – Rachel McAdams, 2018)

I confess that I was waiting for such a movie for quite a while. It’s so long since I have seen a comedy that made me laugh without being stupid, with characters I could care about without falling into melodrama, … Continue reading

Posted in movies | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

a study in vice (Film: The Gambler – Mark Wahlberg, 2014)

The vice of gambling inspired quite a number of literary and cinematographic works, starting maybe with Dostoevsky’s novel which shares the name with the films that inspired it until the almost masterpiece movie “House of Games” written and directed by … Continue reading

Posted in movies | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

broken city, messy movie (Film: Broken City – Mark Wahlberg, 2013)

Sometimes telling the idea or describing the synopsis of the film is much clearer than the feeling that we had while viewing it. This is exactly my feeling about Broken City, a political thriller taking place in the days between … Continue reading

Posted in movies | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

disturbing parable (Film: The Killing of a Sacred Deer – Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017)

The movies of Yorgos Lanthimos are hard to compare or include in a category. Maybe they should be declared a genre of their own. Dogtooth or The Lobster provided dystopian perspectives of family and love.  With ‘The Killing of a … Continue reading

Posted in movies | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

the enemy is not what we believed (Film: The Beguiled – Nicole Kidman, 2017)

Director Sofia Coppola has built a name of herself clearly distinct from the one of her illustrious father by describing the world of women, their fears and tragedies, their anxieties and ambiguities, their relation with the world of men and … Continue reading

Posted in movies | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

melodramatic immigration story (The Immigrant: Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix – 2013)

Director James Gray returns in his 2013 production of The Immigrant to one of his recurrent themes – the one that made him known in the first long feature film he made Little Odessa – immigration, and to his preferred … Continue reading

Posted in movies | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Woody Allen, edition 2016 (Film: Cafe Society – Woody Allen, 2016)

There are a few, very few things one can rely on happening every year, since the 1990s. First there is a Christmas – and yes, also a Passover – taking place each year. Then, there is the Woody Allen film … Continue reading

Posted in movies | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

the magic of ‘seven’ does not fully work (Film: Seven Psychopaths – Martin McDonagh, 2012)

There is a magic about the number ‘seven’ in cinema among other places. Some say it started with Snow White, other will mention Kurosawa. Fact is that many successful films used this magic and succeeded, some of them succeeded great. … Continue reading

Posted in movies | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

selling weapons is not nice kids business (Film: War Dogs – Todd Philips, 2016)

‘War Dogs‘ is the second movie ‘inspired by a true story’ that I have seen in the last 24 hours, and is actually the one that I liked better (the other one being ‘The Infiltrator’). Its film-making style (director Todd Phillips) … Continue reading

Posted in movies | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘boring and watchable’ (Film: The Infiltrator – Brad Furman, 2016)

I could not avoid borrowing the qualifications used by a Web site from Toronto when writing about this film. It’s ‘boring and watchable’. An unusual combination indeed. And yet, this is exactly how I feel about ‘The Infiltrator’ directed by … Continue reading

Posted in movies | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment