Despicable Me 3★★½ Now playing There’s an old Hollywood story about Buster Keaton and animated movies. Apparently, the first time he saw cartoons on the silver screen, he nearly quit show business altogether. He immediately saw that he couldn’t compete with the kind of physical comedy animation made possible. No matter how many elaborate stunts […]
Glenn McDonald
Posted inFilm & Television
Know More About Manhattan Than Your Embattled Neighbors in Rural North Carolina? Then See Raising Bertie.
RAISING BERTIE Saturday, July 1 & Sunday, July 2, 1:45 p.m. The Chelsea Theater, Chapel Hill www.thechelseatheater.com The independent documentary Raising Bertie, filmed in fits and starts over the course of six years, is essentially a coming-of-age movie. Shot in Bertie County, in the rural, eastern part of North Carolina, the film tracks the lives […]
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In Her Remake of Clint Eastwood’s Lurid, Trashy The Beguiled, Sofia Coppola Probes Deeper Rhythms
THE BEGUILED Opening Friday, June 30 Sofia Coppola’s new historical drama, The Beguiled, turns on an intriguing setup: in the waning days of the Civil War, a wounded Union soldier happens upon a girls boarding school deep in the woods of confederate Virginia. In the spirit of Christian charity, the women take him in. With […]
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Movie Review: Letters from Baghdad’s Experimental Approach Doesn’t Entirely Work, but Its Subject, Gertrude Bell, Still Fascinates
Letters from Baghdad★★★ ½ Chelsea Theatre, Chapel Hill Describable only as an experimental documentary, Letters from Baghdad tells the story of Gertrude Bell, the British government official, explorer, and occasional spy who helped draw the borders of modern-day Iraq in the years after the first world war. Bell is sometimes called the female Lawrence of […]
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Eleanor Coppola’s Beautiful Imagery Is Better Than Paris Can Wait’s Thin Story of One Percenters in Mild Crisis
Paris Can Wait Opening Friday, June 16 Very pretty and very slight, Paris Can Wait is the first narrative feature directed by Eleanor Coppola, the eighty-one-year-old photographer and documentary filmmaker who is married to Francis Ford Coppola. Diane Lane stars as Anne, the wife of a busy Hollywood filmmaker, and there’s a scent of autobiography […]
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Movie Review: The Mummy Gets Resurrected in a Middling Reboot
The Mummy ★★ ½ stars Now playing At some point in the past twenty years, Tom Cruise transcended personhood as we know it to become a kind of media-age hybrid of human being and Hollywood brand. Surely the most extreme show business construct ever assembled, Cruise is like a piece of brilliantly optimized cinematic firmware. […]
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In Wakefield, Bryan Cranston Plays a Lawyer Who Ghosts on His Whole Life
WAKEFIELD Opening Friday, June 9 In the realm of pop sociology, the term “ghosting” has developed several connotations. As an update of expressions like French Exit or Irish Goodbye, it means slipping out of a party without saying your farewells. It has an even newer application in the dating world, where it means breaking up […]
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About Baywatch—We Have This Theory on Actor Zac Efron’s Inexplicable Success
Baywatch Opening Thursday, May 25 So I have this theory about Zac Efron and his inexplicable success as an actor. My bet is that, on his eighteenth birthday, as he graduated from Hollywood’s child-star factory, he descended to a secret chamber deep below the sound stages of Burbank. There he took part in unspeakably vile […]
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Movie Review: Alien: Covenant Gets Psychosexual In a Bloody, Baroque, Deeply Weird Story
Alien: Covenant ★★★★ Now playing It’s generally acknowledged that the creature in the Alien franchise is the scariest monster in all of science-fiction cinema. Based on original designs by Swiss artist H.R. Giger, it’s a triumph of sinister design—a Freudian nightmare of biomechanical sex and death. Alien: Covenant, the latest installation by veteran sci-fi director […]
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Film Review: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
KING AUTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD Now playing In the would-be franchise starter King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, director Guy Ritchie gets medieval on our collective asses by twisting Arthurian legend into a British caper film. Hunky Charlie Hunnam is our hero, Jude Law is the baddie, and the future Knights of the Round […]