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| EFC STATS |
| Movies Listed: |
32877 |
| Total Ratings: |
250014 |
| Total Reviews: |
28746 |
![[198020800 Hits]](/cgi-bin/gd.cgi?198020800)
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| LUXOR |
"The Ruins"
Peter Sobczynski says... "The trouble with writing a review of a film like “Luxor” is that even the most basic and carefully composed description of its plot runs the risk of making it sound like either a gooney romance or a painfully pretentious melodrama when it is, in fact, anything but either of those." (more)
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| WANDER |
"a.k.a The Two Two-Faces"
Peter Sobczynski says... "“Wander” is a film that is so bewildering and inexplicable that if I were to even attempt to offer up a summation of its plot, it is likely that most of you would regard me as being as nutty as most of those people in the film regard its central character." (more)
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| LOVE, WEDDINGS & OTHER DISASTERS |
"Speaking Of Disasters. . ."
Peter Sobczynski says... "While I suspect that the inspiration for “Love, Weddings & Other Disasters” was the modern-day perennial “Love Actually,” a film that taught countless numbers of viewers that benign stalking of your friend’s wife is all well and good while giving them wildly unreasonable expectations regarding certain attributes of the state of Wisconsin, it actually comes across like a season’s worth of rejected episode ideas for the old “Love, American Style” show that somehow wound up on a production schedule instead of the incinerator where they were presumably headed." (more)
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| BLACK BEAR |
"Aubrey Plaza Rules—This Is All"
Peter Sobczynski says... "With most films, even the good ones, one can pretty much get a sense of where they are heading within the first few scenes. While watching the strangely compelling “Black Bear,” I realized that I had absolutely no idea where writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine was going with it but he presented the material in such a fascinating manner that I remained consistently eager to see where he would be taking it next. (Suffice it to say, the less you know about it going in, the better.)" (more)
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| LAST VERMEER, THE |
"F for Fake, or taking the mickey out of a true story"
alejandroariera says... "Days after watching producer Dan Friedkin’s directorial debut, “The Last Vermeer,” it dawned on me that there were some superficial similarities between this post World War II thriller and courtroom drama hybrid and “F for Fake,” Orson Welles’ splendid personal essay about fakes, forgeries, filmmaking and the art of illusion, particularly in its critique of how art is valued and by whom. Now, I AM giving “The Last Vermeer” far more credit than it deserves, but the film is at its best whenever one of its two leads, the legendary Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren, is on screen pontificating about art. Like Hungarian painter and forger Elmyr De Houry, one of Welles’ many subjects, van Meegeren, at least as portrayed by Guy Pearce, is a flamboyant, charming bon vivant who is sticking a middle finger at art critics and collectors and museum curators alike. Van Meegeren is, in Clifford Irving’s words when describing De Houry (and as recited by Welles in “F for Fake”) “a man of talent taking the mickey out of those who had rejected him, translating disappointment into a giant joke.” (It takes one to know one: Irving, after all, published a fake biography of Howard Hughes in the early 70s.) Welles’ questions also hang over “The Last Vermeer” as well: “Is it art? Well, how is it valued? The value depends upon opinion, opinion depends on the experts, and fakers like Elmyr makes fools of the experts…” Too bad that the script by James McGee, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby doesn’t trust its source material, “The Man Who Made Vermeers,” Jonathan Lopez’s biography of van Meegeren and an investigation of the network of illicit commerce that made his forgeries possible. I suspect Lopez digs deeper into some of these ideas explored by Welles and that a more faithful adaptation of the book would have made for a better, more ambitious film." (more)
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| FREAKY |
"Fun parts of its two parents, but not the crazy mashup it could have been."
Jay Seaver says... "This movie was almost certainly called "Freaky Friday the Thirteenth" at some point of it being pitched and developed, and I hope the producers reached out to Disney, Paramount, New Line, and/or the estate of Mary Rodgers in the hopes of possibly using that title, because it can't hurt to ask, right? It's fun to imagine what this would be like as a way-off-kilter entry in the franchise(s), rather than a mostly-fun riff that doesn't quite live up to its insane potential." (more)
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| WOLFWALKERS |
"Cartoon Saloon's best bit of animated Irish magic yet."
Jay Seaver says... "The pace of animated film production means that, so long as their work is staggered properly, I can probably get away with calling two or three people the best purveyors of animation out there without it looking too much like I'm being overly enthused about whatever I've seen last. Tomm Moore and the rest of the team at Cartoon Saloon in Kilkenney, Ireland are in that group, and "Wolfwalkers" may be their best movie yet, a kid-friendly adventure that hits familiar notes but never misses." (more)
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| AMMONITE |
"You can miss out on a lot by trying to be really, really sure."
Jay Seaver says... "The opening scene of "Ammonite" - a woman on her knees doing scut work being rudely brushed aside so that men can do something which involves erasing the important contribution of a woman - isn't the movie in miniature, thankfully, but that just makes one wonder why it's so prominent. The film is instead a small love story where the tension is the point, one that would probably impress a bit more if it hadn't appeared in such relatively close proximity to "Portrait of a Lady on Fire", which shares more or less the same structure." (more)
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FILMS I NEGLECTED TO REVIEW: HANG ON TO YOURSELF
by Peter Sobczynski |
| "Please enjoy short reviews of "The Croods: A New Age," "Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square," "The Happiest Season," "Lovers Rock," "The Mystery of D.B. Cooper," "Stardust" and "Uncle Frank,"" (more) |
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'IS LIFE ALWAYS THIS HARD, OR IS IT JUST WHEN YOU'RE A KID?'
- Mathilda, The Professional
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