Writer/director Greta Gerwig (“Lady Bird”) puts a contemporary spin on Louisa May Alcott’s nineteenth century classic novel in Little Women, now in its eight film version. Alcott’s semi-autobiographical story about four sisters growing up in Concord, Massachusetts during and after the Civil War stands out for its warmth and celebration of family, its exquisite period…
Mary Queen of Scots, Josie Rourke’s interpretation of rival queens in the 16th century is stilted and anticlimactic, with poor pacing and a weak screenplay that casts a rather conspicuous shadow over its two prominent leads, Saoirse Ronan (“Lady Bird”) and Margot Robbie (“I, Tonya”). Rourke, long affiliated with the London stage (she’s the artistic…
For her fun fictionalized memoir of sorts, Greta Gerwig has painted a coming-of-age tale almost entirely in shades of grey. Lady Bird is the writer/director’s gentle, through passionately prickly look at the haze that lies just beyond adolescence, with Saoirse Ronan (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”) playing Christine, the also titular protagonist who must navigate the…
As you get immersed in the world of Loving Vincent you quickly realize that it is not the shiny technique alone that makes you feel as though you were floating inside Vincent van Gogh’s brushstrokes, but that, as happens with his painting, there is a profound love for the subject driving each and every frame…
We know, in that achingly familiar phrase, that “absence makes the heart grow fonder” but we sometimes forget that our memories will remain only in our experience and cannot be recreated in time. It is a hard lesson to be learned and one that Eilis Lacey (pronounced Ailish) (Saoirse Ronan, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”), a…
For all red-headed wannabe knights — there is hope! Justin (voiced by Freddie Highmore, “The Spiderwick Chronicles”) is not the most heart-throbbish animated character to grace the screen. His red hair is styled in a bowl-cut (perhaps to avoid Carrot Top mentions) and his ears are a bit pointy. Fortunately, the young boy has a…
Wes Anderson’s filmmaking fingerprints are distinctive, to say the least. His delicate touch is visible in every frame of his carefully constructed pictures, as if he’s built each cinematic world entirely with his own two hands. It’s impressive, but occasionally the result is too mechanically quirky for its own good. And it often feels like…
