There's a saddlebag full of things wrong with this pseudo-historical story of the famed outlaw gang, beginning with the narration throughout by Harry Morgan, which turns the whole affair, at least audibly, into an old west Dragnet episode. Morgan's clipped delivery is not only reminiscent of his old TV series, but it's style is so modern and so very much more suited to a faux-documentary style program like Dragnet or The Untouchables. It suits the old west about as well…
Acclaimed in its time for a visionary approach to imagery in conveying the sense of Dante's Inferno, Peter Greenaway's and Tom Phillips multipart TV experiment, while intriguing as narrative, now seems a cross between a middle-school history slide show and the third worst acid trip ever. John Gielgud, Bob Peck, and Joanne Whalley, among others, render their talking heads as Virgil, Dante, and Beatrice, respectively, reading Dante's poetry beautifully. Behind and sometimes visually overlapping them is a monotonous litany of…
It took many years, but I finally found a science-fiction movie I hated worse than Star Wars. This pseudo-mythic melange of Islamic-Gaelic-Hebrew-Christian nomenclature and ponderous Sir Gawainish “dialog” has virtually no intelligible story beyond the barest framework of presumably good guys in conflict with assortments of monosyllabic bad guys. No effort is evident in making the characters identifiable humans one could connect with emotionally (although Jason Momoa, through force of personality, comes close). It’s all sci-fi fanboy wanking, with all…
This remarkable tale of loneliness, purpose, and what we now call "unfriending" is another in the stunning emotional explorations by writer-director Martin McDonagh. In a performance that tops anything of his I've ever seen, Colin Farrell is heartbreaking as a provincial Irish lad who cannot understand and will not grasp that his closest friend no longer wants his friendship. As the former friend, Brendan Gleeson is also superb, but the picture really belongs to Farrell, who plays exquisitely the balancing…
