What's more frustrating than a "re-boot" that takes the title, character names, and as little from the original's premise as they could possible get away with? Guy Ritchie's film features some great fight and chase sequences and the overall style is an affectionate and handsome homage to 60s espionage films, but the often campy tone of the series is replaced here by tiresome "48 Hours"-style bickering between the partner spies, and it's not value added. What's good in action sequences…
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The Trial of the Chicago 7 2020
Films from (particularly recent) history run on parallel tracks: imparting accurate history is one, making a point through that history is the other. If the second is too pronounced, it can undercut the first. Sorkin's style is recognizable enough that one becomes aware of watching history being written through his lens. That's acceptable in scenes obviously fabricated, like lawyer conferences; but for courtroom scenes, or other situations for which a record exists, I feel an implicit covenant should exist and…
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Berlin Alexanderplatz 1980
Overwhelmingly brilliant. This is one of those transformative artistic experiences that transcend the highest ranking -- five stars and then some. Fassbinder's achievement is breathtaking in its scope and its depth and its success in honoring the intentions of Alfred Döblin's novel (considered the broad equivalent of Ulysses for Weimar Germany). Each moment of these 15 plus hours is perfectly and compellingly realized. The length allows for novelistic detail to be achieved on screen in a really unusual manner. The…
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The Buddha of Suburbia 1993
What a rich tapestry is this adaptation of the (presumably somewhat autobiographical) Hanif Kureishi novel that I read and loved back in the 90s; I finally got around to the miniseries. The film suffers a small bit from the absence of a narrator to provide context that you get in the book, so things can feel slightly elliptical, particularly in the last episode (which, funnily enough, is also the episode when some cast -- I'm thinking of Susan Fleetwood and…
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