Frances Ha is a sweet film about a naive, socially-awkward, daydreaming and totally irresponsible New York dancer who spirals out of control and has to learn to grow up quicksticks after she falls out with her best friend. Filmed in black and white, and with a great deal of tenderness, the story bounces from New…
Read moreDisconnect
If you’ve “liked” Louis CK’s rant about smartphones recently, you’ll also enjoy Disconnect. Well, maybe enjoy is a strong word. It’s basically a grim tale about cyber crime and identity theft and online bullying and the tendency these days for us to play out our lives via the internet with no thought to the consequences….
Read moreSide Effects
Wow, Side Effects is a good movie. It begins with the tale of a depressed young society wife whose medication plays really nasty tricks on her….but then becomes so much more. To be honest, I was really expecting a Sodeburgh procedural exposing the iniquities of Big Pharma – a Contagion-esque whodunnit following the insistent thudding…
Read moreLola Versus
Here’s a question. So, given that the TV Series Girls – 4 whimsical, twenty-something, upper echelon New York women having perpetual bad dates in an “eco-system of oddity” (thanks Peter Bradshaw) – is such a runaway critical success, why are the same critics panning the movie Lola Versus? In it, Greta Gerwig stars as Lola,…
Read moreMan on a Ledge
The title says it all, really: Aussie Brickie Sam Worthington spends an entire movie stuck on a ledge, twenty-something floors up and on the outside of the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. Elizabeth Banks is the cop who has to talk him down, Ed Harris the corrupt businessman that Sam’s trying to nab in the most…
Read moreTower Heist
In Tower Heist, Ben Stiller plays Josh, the manager of one of those opulent Trump Towers-y residential buildings in New York. He prides himself on running a slick and efficient team (all star cast here) that attends to the pampered needs of others. One of those others, the owner of the penthouse suite, is a…
Read moreLimitless
In Limitless, Bradley Cooper plays Eddie Morra, a grungy, feckless, kind-of-despicable no-hoper, whose life is completely transformed on consumption of a teensie leettle pill. Said pill is engineered to activate the bits of brain that normally go unused – that’s quite a bit of brain for Mr. Morra – thus turning Bradley from homeless-looking dude…
Read moreAcross the Universe
I caught Across the Universe on tv the other day. It’s the Julie Taymor-directed piece that flung Jim Sturgess into the spotlight, using Beatles songs to move the story forward. (Each of the six leads sing their little lungs out on screen – and jolly well too, it must be said.) At first this conceit…
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