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A STAR ISN’T BORN

Film In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
14437

The best compliment I can give the new version of A Star is Born is that I didn’t mind it. I’ve done my best to avoid previews and hype in order to view it with fresh eyes, and I think it’s pretty good. In a part crafted especially for her, Lady Gaga gives a decent-enough performance, but I can’t agree with the wild predictions I’ve read of movie stardom ahead. She has the ability to fill this specific role reasonably well, under the careful tutelage of her costar, Bradley Cooper. (Her singing voice is another matter: the woman has tremendous power and potency.) But it’s Cooper who walks away with the honors here. He is completely credible as a drug-and-drink-addicted country music star, and his vocals are…

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CRITERION SPOTLIGHTS DIETRICH, LOMBARD, AND LUBITSCH

Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
6441

The Criterion Collection remains the Gold Standard for DVDs and Blu-rays. While they cast a wide net over world cinema and contemporary releases by true auteurs, they truly win my heart when they approach Hollywood classics. Several new releases bear that out in fine fashion.   DIETRICH & VON STERNBERG IN HOLLYWOOD is a boxed set that scores an A+ for merely providing beautiful high-definition transfers of six of the most exotic, indulgently exquisite movies ever made: Morocco, Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress, and The Devil is a Woman. To quote the promotional copy, “Over the course of six films produced by Paramount in the 1930s, the pair refined their shared fantasy of pleasure, beauty and excess.” There are a variety of…

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THE OLD MAN & THE GUN

Film In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
7984

I’ve always enjoyed watching Robert Redford onscreen, and although he’s no longer a youngster he retains every bit of the star quality that blossomed sixty years ago. The Old Man & the Gun is a vehicle in the best sense of that term, a good story that showcases its leading man to best advantage. (Nothing if not self-aware, Redford acquired the screen rights to this true story as reported in The New Yorker and brought it to director David Lowery, whom he enjoyed working with on Pete’s Dragon.) He plays an unlikely character that I doubt anyone would invent because he’d scarcely be believable: a gentleman bank robber, and a good one at that. He’s been arrested sixteen times and managed to escape every single time. He is so  unassuming…

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THE PREDATOR

Film In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
6455

This continuation of the Predator series from writer-director Shane Black starts out well and then peters out. Too bad: I was in its grip for a long time. The storyline is difficult to synopsize—and that’s putting it mildly. Suffice it to say that a towering, ugly alien has landed on Earth. A secret branch of the U.S. government is examining him when he awakens and all hell breaks loose. A maverick Army sniper (Boyd Holbrook) accidentally gets involved, along with a gun-toting biologist (Olivia Munn). Holbrook winds up being committed to a psychiatric hospital and is placed in a bus with a bunch of “loonies.” They eventually band together to save themselves and, in the process, do the right thing…especially when Holbrook’s young son (Jacob Tremblay) is…

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MOVIES ABOUT MOVIES: FROM PETER SELLERS AND BUSTER KEATON TO ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ

Film Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
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With each passing year we see more documentaries about films and filmmakers. Some get only a passing nod while others are embraced by critics and buffs alike. At this year’s Telluride Film Festival a number of such docs stood out. I had the pleasure of interviewing director Peter Medak about his remarkable film The Ghost of Peter Sellers, in which the Hungarian-born filmmaker travels back 45 years to explore what went wrong with a seemingly sure-fire project proposed by Sellers. He and longtime Goon Show pal Spike Milligan wrote Ghost in the Noonday Sun but the filming was an absolute disaster.     Why would a man who has worked successfully in film and television all these years (with some great ones like The Ruling Class to his credit) choose to revisit the…

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CELEBRATING OSCAR LEVANT

Leonard Maltin Music
10893

Oscar Levant was one of a kind: a piano prodigy, Gershwin acolyte, songwriter, noted wit, radio and television personality, best-selling author, and even on occasion a screen actor. His fans are legion, and I am one of them…but even I couldn’t have envisioned that in the year 2018 Sony Classical would issue an 8-CD boxed set that’s designed to look like an old 78rpm album. A Rhapsody in Blue includes every classical recording Levant made from 1942 to 1958, when he was the highest-paid classical artist in the country. What’s more, it faithfully reproduces the eye-catching Alex Steinweiss covers that accompanied the music. Best of all, executive producer Robert Russ called on Levant devotee and musicologist Michael Feinstein to share his collection of memorabilia and…

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REMEMBERING BURT REYNOLDS—TRUTHFULLY

Journal Leonard Maltin
26931

“I’d love to slug ya but there are ladies present.” That’s how Burt Reynolds greeted me the first time I met him, while covering the Western-themed Golden Boot Awards for Entertainment Tonight in the early 1980s. Determined to keep my cool, I told him, “I have never said an unkind word about you… about some of your films, yes, but never about you.” “Oh,” he said mockingly, “So then it wasn’t personal.” (No, it wasn’t.) At that point my cameraman was ready to go and Reynolds gave me a wonderful interview about the legacy of the Western, as his then-wife Loni Anderson looked on approvingly. Somehow, the actor had been led to believe that I was gunning for him and had gone on at least two national television shows…

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