Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy

BABYLON: AN ELEPHANTINE TIME TRIP

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews December 23, 2022

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Give Damien Chazelle credit for loving movies and Hollywood history. That’s what led him down the long and winding road to Babylon. But we all know what the road to hell is paved with, and this movie is a shining example of good intentions gone amok. The writer-director of La La Land became fascinated with the notion that the same people who perfected an art form in the 1920s indulged in bacchanalian behavior away from work. Hollywood was also a place where a nobody could become a somebody seemingly overnight. That carefree anything-can-happen atmosphere came to a screeching halt with the arrival of talkies. Those are just some of the pieces in this wildly ambitious mosaic, which runs just over three hours. Some of it works,…

WOMEN TALKING: ONE OF A KIND

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews December 23, 2022

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Sarah Polley has carved her own path, first as an actress and now as a filmmaker, having piloted a highly personal documentary (Stories We Tell) and two frank observational pieces about marriage (Take This Waltz, Away from Her). But nothing she has done before could prepare an audience for Women Talking, which she has adapted from a novel by Miriam Toews. Polley takes a bold, formalist approach to this provocative chamber drama about a group of women who have been brutalized by the men of their isolated community. They agree that they must make a life-altering decision: to run away, to stay and fight, or to do nothing. The women, of all ages, have been barred from getting an education, and make sound yet sometimes contradictory…

THE LITTLE RASCALS AT 100

Blu-Ray/DVD Leonard Maltin December 16, 2022

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My, how time flies. It was one hundred years ago that Hal Roach came up with the idea of putting ordinary kids together in a series of comedy shorts. The official name was Our Gang, but the titles often referred to Hal Roach’s Rascals. When he sold Our Gang to MGM in 1938 and had to devise a new name for the original shorts, they were officially rechristened The Little Rascals. The films hold up extremely well. They were a mainstay of television syndication, which is how they were introduced to new generations of fans. Now they look and sound better than ever, thanks to the digital cleanup and restoration done by ClassicFlix. Their Centennial Edition DVD/Blu-ray set is a must-have, not only for the 80 sound shorts but…

AVATAR: ON THE CUTTING EDGE

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews December 16, 2022

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I surrender. It’s easy to poke holes in James Cameron’s films because of awkward dialogue or glib characterizations or his propensity for staging climaxes to his climaxes. But I was completely taken in by Avatar: The Way of Water and overwhelmed by its fluid, kinetic action scenes, eye-popping production design and propulsive storytelling. I have only a sketchy memory of the original film from 2009 and could have used a recap at the outset of this new saga. At first I had trouble distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys in this sequel, but the answers soon became self-evident. The narrative is an obligatory clothesline on which the filmmaker can hang a series of spectacular vignettes. The key ingredient in this epic, expansive movie—which runs more…

OSCARS MAKE HISTORY AGAIN

Leonard Maltin November 22, 2022

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Every time The Academy presents awards it adds a page to Hollywood history. As we learn in Bruce Davis’s fine new book The Academy and the Award (Brandeis University Press) the institution known for its Oscars has given honorary awards for many years. But in the 1940s the decisions were made rather haphazardly, often the night before the award ceremony. Producer Walter Wanger talked a tired board of governors into giving him such an award in the wee hours of the morning just so they could go home to bed. In more recent times the producers of the Oscar telecast have been under pressure to shorten the event without giving short shrift to the winners of the honorary awards, as so often happens. Thus, in…

THE FABELMANS: STEVEN SPIELBERG’S ULTIMATE HOME MOVIE

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews November 10, 2022

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A handful of directors have given us movies about their youth, but none of their origin stories are as well-known as Steven Spielberg’s. In The Fabelmans the most famous and successful filmmaker of our time offers his version of the events that shaped his life and career. Somewhat surprisingly, he exposes his interior life as well as his narrative. And being Steven Spielberg, he has made certain that the result is a crowd-pleaser. The Fabelmans opens on the night he saw Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth in 1952 and illustrates what motivated him to pick up a movie camera for the first time: he wanted to know how the Old Master staged and edited a heart-stopping train wreck. His father is dismissive of the results but his…

THE RETURN OF TANYA TUCKER: FEATURING BRANDI CARLILE

In Theaters Leonard Maltin October 30, 2022

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Everyone loves a good comeback story, as witness the current buzz surrounding actor Brendan Fraser, who’s been out of the limelight for a while. Embracing an underdog can seem like a cliché but rekindling a show-business career is no easy task. Allowing a filmmaker to document that process takes more nerve than some people could muster. Tanya Tucker has plenty of nerve. She’s seen it all, from hit records to tabloid headlines, in a career that began at the age of 11. What makes her story compelling is that her talent remains intact, a simple fact that inspired her number-one fan, Grammy-winning vocalist Brandi Carlile, to engineer a second act for Tanya’s dormant career. She lured Tucker back into a recording studio for the first…