Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy

DAY OF THE FIGHT

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews December 19, 2024

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What ever happened to genre movies? Hollywood thrived on westerns, musicals, gangster stories, hospital dramas, whodunits and the like until television consumed almost every category. The Day of the Fight isn’t trying to rewrite the playbook. It’s a boxing picture, and it hits most of the notes we anticipate…but that’s what makes it so satisfying. It gives us what we expect from a boxing movie. As the executive says to forlorn screenwriter Barton Fink, “What do you need—a road map?” Our hero (a perfectly-cast Michael C. Pitt) has just been sprung from prison after twenty long years. Upon his release, he is driven to make amends to people he was closest to, even those who hurt him—like his father (Joe Pesci), now living in a nursing home…

EMILIA PÉREZ: UNIQUE AND AMAZING

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews December 19, 2024

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Phrases like “game-changer” and “cutting-edge” can’t capture just how audacious and original Emilia Pérez is. I daresay it wouldn’t or couldn’t have been made, or even conceived, just ten years ago. (Maybe five…) I am determined to praise and discuss it without giving too much away. Here goes: Emilia Pérez is a crime thriller that boils over into melodrama, laced with violent action. It has been described as operatic, which makes particular sense when you learn that it is punctuated with a dozen musical numbers. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when filmmaker Jacques Audiard auditioned this idea for his backers. Zoe Saldaña gives an excellent performance as a lawyer who has become bored with her work, making her a perfect choice to take on…

BLITZ: UNLIKE ANYTHING WE’VE SEEN BEFORE

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews November 23, 2024

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Blitz is a powerful and somewhat disarming film about the longterm German bombing of London in 1940. One might be forgiven for expecting a kinder, gentler rendition of this horrific event because it’s told through the eyes of a 9-year-old boy. Guess again. Writer-director Steve McQueen spares us nothing in his recreation of the conditions before, during, and after each attack. If anything, they seem even more frightening than any dramatization we’ve seen up until now. It opens with a shot of a firefighter losing control of his hose—a truly scary situation I’ve never witnessed before—and doesn’t let up. Up till now, the citizens who endured the seemingly endless noise and destruction have displayed quiet bravery and adopted that stiff upper lip for which the Brits…

A REAL PAIN

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews November 23, 2024

1981

Jesse Eisenberg has nothing to prove; he has already staked his claim as an actor, writer, and director. But A Real Pain digs deeper than he ever has before; even the film’s title has multiple meanings. The movie simmers and occasionally boils over. The end result is a satisfying brew (to stretch a metaphor). As a writer he and Kieran Culkin share the emotional burden of the story. Culkin’s is the showier performance but Eisenberg’s quieter demeanor reveals just as much about him as Culkin does, in a different way. They both excel in bringing these recognizable characters to life. The actors portray cousins who have been close all of their lives, through many ups and downs. Eisenberg has followed a conventional path and has a job,…

WHAT’S NEW ON DVD/BLU-RAY/4K IN NOVEMBER

Blu-Ray/DVD November 23, 2024

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The following article was written by my friend and colleague Alonso Duralde. You can learn more about him HERE. WHAT’S NEW ON DVD/BLU-RAY/4K IN NOVEMBER: BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE; BOX SETS CELEBRATING CRITERION COLLECTION, HITCHCOCK, AND CAPRA; AND SO MUCH CHRISTMAS NEW RELEASE WALL Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment): Neither director Tim Burton nor sequels in general have had the greatest track record of late, but even after 36 years, Michael Keaton remains the ghost with the most, with Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara making wonderfully eccentric foils. Add Jenna Ortega as a new-millennial Goth girl, and you’ve got a dizzyingly daffy afterlife comedy (with another great Danny Elfman score). Also available: The 4:30 Movie (Lionsgate): Kevin Smith takes a dive into multiplex-moviegoing nostalgia in this…

A BIT OF CRUMPET: WATERSHIP DOWN

A Bit Of Crumpet November 23, 2024

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Leonard here. The following column is written by my colleague Mark Searby highlighting British cinema past and present. Please enjoy A Bit of Crumpet. Think you’re a tough guy, huh? Real tough, yeah? You thought A Serbian Film was funny did you? Threads was a light-hearted documentary was it? Well, let’s see how tough you really are when I sit you down and make you watch (like Malcolm McDowell having his eyes locked open in A Clockwork Orange) one of the most harrowing films of all time – Watership Down. Yeah! YEAH! That’s changed the look on your face. Abject terror now. All joking aside. Who can sit through Watership Down without feeling dread and anxiety and just a foreboding sense of what is to come? If…

NEW AND NOTABLE BOOKS NOVEMBER 2024

Books November 11, 2024

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ZEPPO: THE RELUCTANT MARX BROTHER by Robert S. Bader (Applause) This is a revelatory book, achieved through painstaking research (see: Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage by the same author) and the participation of Zeppo Marx’s two sons and other family members and friends who were close to him. Getting close to Zeppo was no easy task, as we quickly learn. The youngest of the celebrated Marx Brothers, he was shoehorned into their vaudeville act against his will, put on salary instead of earning a share of their ever-rising salary and given thankless roles in their first five movies. After deciding to leave the act in 1934 he determined not only to make good but to outdo his siblings in every way—especially when…