Frank Sinatra’s film career was at its apex when he made the crime thriller Suddenly (1954); he had just won an Oscar for his work in From Here to Eternity and he was soon to star or co-star in Not as […]
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She (1935) ✰ ✰ ✰ ½
H. Rider Haggard’s adventure story has been filmed at least eight times. I’ve never seen the five silent versions, nor the 1965 version with Ursula Andress, and the 1985 version with Sandahl Bergman is awful, but the original 1935 version […]
Continue reading »Midnight in Paris (2011) ✰ ✰ ✰
A screenwriter (Owen Wilson) is in Paris with his fiancé (Rachel McAdams) and her parents. He realizes he loves the city and starts thinking about living there and being a novelist. He begins to travel back in time to the […]
Continue reading »The Last Hurrah (1958) ✰ ✰ ✰ ½
John Ford’s contemporary political film follows the last campaign of a big city mayor, Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy, masterful), as he battles a younger candidate favored by the blue bloods. Skeffington is of Irish descent and represents a style of […]
Continue reading »War Horse (2011) ✰ ✰ ✰ ½
It would be relatively easy to wring sentiment from a story about a horse and the young man who raises him, and War Horse certainly exploits that relationship about as fully as one would expect. Yet the film is so much […]
Continue reading »We Bought a Zoo (2011) ✰ ✰ ✰
While most of us would never have the gumption, the wherewithal or the ability to try to bring a failed zoo back to life, it’s a neat dream, and it’s very cool that somebody actually did it, and now there’s […]
Continue reading »New Year’s Eve (2011) ✰ ✰ ½
This holiday star-fest is a cute little cupcake of a movie, light and frilly-looking, with just enough icing to leave a sweet taste (or be sickening, if one doesn’t care for so much Hollywood icing). This is the second of […]
Continue reading »The Help (2011) ✰ ✰ ½
Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, The Help chronicles the writing of a book meant to tell the stories of African-American domestics working in the homes of whites. Based on a popular novel, The Help follows three white […]
Continue reading »Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol ✰ ✰ ✰
Long-time Filmbobbery readers may recall that I have not been a big fan of the Mission: Impossible film franchise with Tom Cruise. I even wrote a diatribe about the first two films in my fourth issue, titled “Missions Ridiculous.” Well, that tide […]
Continue reading »Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) ✰ ✰ ½
The second of Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” adventures is, on the whole, about the same as the first. Its story is darker than the first, pushing the brilliant but eccentric private detective (before there was such a thing) across Europe […]
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