Cars 3

Review by Bob Ignizio

I am the father of a six-year-old boy. It should therefore come as no surprise that I have seen CARS, CARS 2, and MATER TALES, in whole or in part, several times each. It just kind of goes with the territory.

In general, critics have dismissed the CARS franchise as a mediocre piece of product from a studio, Pixar, that otherwise is the gold standard of animation. They are not wrong. Nonetheless, through repetition, the positive aspects of these films have come into sharper focus for me.

There are some funny bits, the voice cast are mostly likeable, and the always top notch Pixar animation is still top notch. I wouldn't describe any of these movies as good, but for product aimed at the kiddie market, there's plenty worse out there.

Live By Night

By George M. Thomas

Ben Affleck and Zoe Saldana in Live By
Night.

As a filmmaker it’s been fair to say that Ben Affleck has earned the reputation as steady.

As his subject matter as a director started in his hometown of Boston with THE TOWN and veered into history with ARGO,  Affleck displayed natural skill as a director.  He continues that with LIVE BY NIGHT, a cinematic trip that combines both - his love for Boston with a loving look back into history.

While Boston isn’t the complete focus, it plays a distinct role in who Doug MacRay (Affleck), the film’s morally fluid center, is even as he takes hold of a criminal enterprise in Prohibition-era Tampa, Fla.

LIVE BY NIGHT possesses a sense of style along with memorable characters and a captivating story.   It’s an old fashioned morality tale trussed up with some modern trappings.

But at its heart is the story of MacRay, a young guy making the mistakes young guys make.  He’s impetuous.  He’s intelligent and he’s ambitious.

Demolition

Review by Pamela Zoslov

DEMOLITION opens with an auto accident that kills the wife of Davis, a successful Manhattan investment banker. A similar collision is taking place between the styles of the movie's writer, Bryan Sipe, and its director, the Quebecois Jean-Marc Vallée.


Sipe's screenplay is a conventionally glossy Hollywood weeper, which has Jake Gyllenhaal as the young widower unable to come to terms with the death of his wife, Julia (Heather Lind). Despite the urgings of his father-in-law, Phil (Chris Cooper), who is also his boss, Davis is unable to cry or grieve in the expected ways. Instead, he becomes obsessed with taking things apart, literally — the refrigerator his wife had asked him to repair; furniture, lamps and bathroom stalls at his office; eventually, his shiny glass-box house in White Plains, which he attacks ferociously with sledgehammers and even a bulldozer. It's a clumsy, heavy-handed metaphor for grief and the postmortem examination of a marriage. (He's “taking things apart,” get it?)

August: Osage County

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Every time I think I can't bear to see Meryl Streep in another movie, she surprises me with her transporting skill. As Violet Weston, the pill-addicted matriarch at the center of Tracy Letts' AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, Streep sinks her incisors into the role and works it with savage precision. It is exactly what's called for by the play, a dark comedy that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and has now been adapted, by the playwright, for the screen.

I have a similar aversion to Julia Roberts, whose familiarity can make it impossible to see her as anyone but Julia Roberts. But as Barbara, Violet's daughter, Roberts takes the tough-minded character firmly in hand . She may be a bit too refined-looking to have emerged from the rural Okie home where the story takes place, but her performance, a vehement match for Streep's, compensates. The casting of well-known stars in roles made famous by less known stage actors is, I guess, a necessary part of adapting plays (box office, you know.). In this case, the casting choices are good, even though we're never for a moment unaware that we're watching movie stars.