Tagged: Movie Review

 The great thing about Arbitrage is that writer-director Nicholas Jarecki never gives in to what must have been a temptation to surrender his theme to Hollywood melodrama. Arbitrage begins and ends as a story of how one moral failure leads to another one and how one person’s weakness involves other people, one man’s guilt makes other people act guiltily, too, without going beyond what ordinary people with understandable motives might do, under the circumstances.

The Cold Light of Day is just a plateful of same-old same-old.  Don’t expect anything better just because Bruce Willis and Sigourney Weaver are in it, because they are strictly support players and must have fallen on bad days to be in such warmed over mashed potatoes as this.  One would think they would have had enough clout to insist on at least colorful character roles.

Except for The Passion of the Christ, I can’t think of another movie that revels in blood and pain as much asLawless does.  For once, every smash of the brass knuckles and every blast of the bullets reaps its harvest of gore and the camera lingers to pick up the writhing and groaning.  And yet Lawless seems to be a little squeamish about exactly what happened to the captive heroine and what Guy Pearce did to Dane DeHaan except to kill him, which would hardly inspire so much fury in the world of Virginia hills during the moonshine days of Prohibition.  It’s not for me t

Ruby Sparks is a happy surprise for at least three reasons: heroine Zoe Kazan is a fun new actress who also wrote the script, it is an enjoyable love story, and it is a pleasant comic variation on Frankenstein; unless one is very sensitive to bad language, I can’t see why anyone would not like it.