Believe it or not, another set of awards is vying for our attention as prize season nears its at-long-last end.
Does Quentin Tarantino still show prospective girlfriends Rio Bravoto see whether they're worth having around? The writing team of David Newman and Robert Benton opined—shortly before we got to know them for Bonnie and Clyde—that this long, casual-seeming Howard Hawks movie from 1959 is "maybe one of the four or five best movies ever made in America." (Why stop there?) The program note reproduced here assumes the reader has seen the film, and indeed had been seeing other Hawks pictures in a UW film series. —RTJ
You don't review movies like these, you step on them.
Soft for Digging announces the arrival of a major talent. A reclusive old man leaves his shack in a damp Maryland woods and hobbles deeper into the backcountry to see what became of his cat....
Anticipating Kathleen Murphy's MSN.com review of Red Riding Hood, here's the link to an MSN feature Murphy did a while back on horror's werewolf subgenre: http://entertainment.msn.com/news/article.aspx?news=248401
Limitless does not precisely describe Kathleen Murphy's approval of the new Bradley Cooper movie of the same name, but she sees some value in it at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/limitless/#Review_0
"Me and Maggie the Cat," Kathleen Murphy's memorial piece on the late Elizabeth Taylor, is available to read at MSN.com Movies, http://movies.msn.com/movies/memoriam-taylor/
Rodrick rules nowhere as far as Kathleen Murphy is concerned: http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/diary-of-a-wimpy-kid-rodrick-rules/#Review_0
The U.S. release of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest marks the conclusion of the onscreen adventures of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist - at least, for now. Suffice it to note that the hornet's nest kicked in the final book and movie is an ultra-reactionary secret bureau of the Swedish government....
Turner Classic Movies recently ran a movie that's rarely shown but is eminently deserving of attention: Accident, a 1967 British film directed by American expatriate Joseph Losey and written for the screen by the late Harold Pinter (who also appears in a brief, ultra-Pinteresque scene). The team had made The Servant several years earlier, a savage black comedy of social class, sexual identity, and the sort of power struggle both can inspire. That film became something of an arthouse hit; Accident did not, but it's a subtler and more disturbing picture—haunting, really. Once more, the article I'm posting isn't a straightforward review or conventional critical essay. It was written about five years ago for a fascinating project Jim Emerson had going at his provocative Scanners website (http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/), a study of opening shots and how they set up what their movies are going to be about and how they're going to go at it. I also say something about the last shot, so if you're leery of possible spoilers, postpone reading the last several paragraphs till after seeing the movie. —RTJ
Bethany Hamilton's story is legitimately inspirational. Kathleen Murphy finds that the same cannot be said for Soul Surfer, the new movie about her: http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/soul-surfer/#Review_0
The new Robert Redford picture The Conspirator files a brief on behalf of the woman accused of abetting the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In the ongoing conspiracy to commit film criticism, this gave me the excuse to write about some favorite movies under cover of an MSN.com/Movies feature on films built around assassinations: http://movies.msn.com/assassination-movies/photo-gallery/feature/
Sometime QAN movie reviewer Kathleen Murphy recently wrote an MSN.com/Movies feature on notable film work by Cher; yes, there's more than you might think. Visit it here.
Distant early warnings of the tsunami, i.e., this year's edition of the Seattle International Film Festival, May 19–June 12
Hesher has almost no redeeming qualities, including the ones convention would lead you to expect. Hesher the movie has quite a few, according to Kathleen Murphy: http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/hesher/#Review_0