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TWO OF US: A SENSATIONAL SLEEPER

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
3842

There’s nothing more exciting to me than making a discovery. I wasn’t at the Toronto International Film Festival when Two of Us made its debut in the fall of 2019. It has played other prestigious festivals, including Los Angeles’ Outfest.…but I finally made it a priority when I read that it is France’s official entry for the Academy Awards this year. Now I’m telling everyone who will listen that it’s a must-see. Two of Us opens with an intriguing prologue showing two girls playing hide and seek. It’s a visual metaphor that foreshadows a crimp in the longtime, loving relationship between two older women, played by the great German actress Barbara Sukowa and the Comédie Française veteran Martine Chevallier. They plan to run off to Rome to start a…

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OUR FRIEND: A CLICHÉ-FREE TEARJERKER

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
5531

I was tempted to dismiss Our Friend as just another movie about a loved one’s battle with a fatal disease. Then I watched it. Yes, it’s a tearjerker, but it’s derived from a first-person article from Esquire that won the National Magazine Award. It has three exceptional performances—by Dakota Johnson, Casey Affleck, and Jason Segel. And it illuminates the reality of how a woman’s bout with cancer affects everyone around her, altering her relationships, both casual and crucial. Real life can be messy. By jumping back and forth in time, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite and screenwriter Brad Ingelsby keep us alert to the ever-changing status of the main characters: Johnson is a radiant woman who shares her gift of caring with a circle of friends as well as her husband…

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REMEMBERING THE DAUGHTER OF A HOLLYWOOD LEGEND

Leonard Maltin
6811

Time was when you could count on the Hollywood trade papers and local press to track the births, deaths, and marriages in all of show business. Lately, however, my wife Alice has taken to reading the paid death announcements in the Los Angeles Times. It is here that she discovers some fascinating life stories as recounted by the departed’s family. It would be hard to top this one, regarding the daughter of beloved stage and screen actor Pat O’Brien. It appeared Sunday, January 31. I’ll let the family’s memorial speak for itself.

‘THE LITTLE THINGS’ DON’T ADD UP

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
6112

One of the seven deadly sins of moviemaking—perhaps the deadliest—is   boring an audience. Having just been victimized by The Little Things the least I can do is share my experience with you.  Denzel Washington stars as a former LAPD homicide detective who has been reassigned to routine sheriff’s deputy duty out in the boondocks. It takes a while to find out what skeletons are rattling in his closet, but during a brief trip to L.A. he meets his replacement, a bright, dedicated man played by Rami Malek. His current task is trying to catch a serial rapist and killer. With no clues to go on, he accepts Washington’s offer of help, and before long he begins to adopt Washington’s obsessive tendencies. Jared Leto is their…

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‘THE WHITE TIGER’ IS A KNOCKOUT

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
4448

The White Tiger represents a perfect marriage between a gifted filmmaker and an incendiary novel. As it happens, director Ramin Bahrani is a close friend of novelist Aravind Adiga and has worked for years to bring this prize-winning book to the screen. Bahrani has wisely adopted the author’s first-person approach to his sprawling narrative. This enables him to embrace all the irony, sarcasm, and contradiction embedded in the telling of a saga. Balram (played to perfection by Adarsh Gourav) is a dirt-poor villager who journeys to the city to live out his dream of success as an entrepreneur. Yet he is inexorably tied to a fate determined for him by generations of impoverished ancestors: to spend his life as a willing, self-sacrificing servant. This well-trodden path…

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NOW STREAMING: LET HIM GO

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
7076

It’s rare to find a Hollywood movie featuring mature stars that’s worthy of their participation and has a decent story to tell. Let Him Go is based on a novel by Larry Watson, interpreted here by writer-director Thomas Bezucha (who won me over with his 2005 feature The Family Stone). Costner has settled comfortably into a Gary Cooper niche, playing an ex-sheriff and rancher who accompanies his wife, Diane Lane, on a journey that leads to sadness and sacrifice far beyond their expectations. Lane, who is always good, has never been better. Her character is well-drawn, with shadings and colorings the actress rarely gets to play. She seems like a straight shooter but keeps a well of emotion in reserve, lest it burst open and drown her in…

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MLK/FBI: A CHANGING PERSPECTIVE

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
4290

I was in my teens when the Civil Rights movement reached its apex in the 1960s. I wasn’t politically engaged back then, but I retain an indelible image of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a man of innate dignity whose approach to protest was emphatically non-violent. He stood in sharp contrast to a new breed of black leaders like Malcolm X and Huey Newton. I also remember my impression of J. Edgar Hoover, which is more difficult to impart to younger people who have (understandably) come to demonize him. My generation was raised to believe that he and his Federal Bureau of Investigation were the ultimate Good Guys—dedicated, clean-cut, hard-working men who protected us from enemies on all sides. That’s just one of the…

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