Monthly Archives: May 2014

“Maleficent” did well Thursday night and quite well on Friday. So barring a rash of critics’ warnings heeded and bad word of mouth, millions of tykes will be scared by the violence and the Jolie of this Disney misfire on … Continue reading →

The reviews are in, and the big studio releases this weekend won’t be boosted at the box office by the critics, myself included. The joyless “Maleficent” earned weak to poor notices — kind of “Oz the Great and Powerful” but … Continue reading →

“Lucky Them” is an indie rock’n roll romance that had a good enough script to attract decent talent, just not good enough to develop any one of its many promising threads. File it under “slight, but worth checking out,” mainly … Continue reading →

Movie There’s something to be said for giving even tiny tykes a good, old fashioned fright all in the name of good clean fun. But Disney’s “Maleficent” still feels like a sour miscalculation on somebody’s part. A dark, gloomy and … Continue reading →

If America hadn’t produced Gore Vidal, we’d probably have had to import him.Novelist and playwright, wit and patrician-voiced politician, gadfly and scold, we might have been able to buy him at a British sale of surplus public intellectuals from the … Continue reading →

The young couple doesn’t say much when they visit the remote hydroelectric dam.“No fish ladders,” she complains. “Wonder how they got around that?”There’s not a lot of spark between them, even when they’re shopping for a ski boat. They have … Continue reading →

What were your first thoughts on seeing the snippets of video of Elliot Rodger, son of a Hollywood second unit director, as he gave his reasons for setting out on a killing spree? Hollywood brat, I thought. Not ugly, apparently … Continue reading →