KCRW's Film Reviews

2012; Pirate Radio

podmaster@kcrw.org (Joe Morgenstern) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:44:00 EST

2012 is Roland Emmerich's latest assault on planet Earth and its moviegoers, and it isn't the end of the world: it only feels that way...

Pirate Radio follows the form -- when it chooses to follow any form -- of a cat-and-mouse game between the British government, circa 1966, and a crew of deejays beaming round-the-clock rock and roll from a decrepit tanker anchored in the North Sea just outside Britain's territorial waters...

A Christmas Carol; Precious

podmaster@kcrw.org (Joe Morgenstern) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:44:00 EST

To put it bluntly, and Scroogely, Disney's 3-D animated version of A Christmas Carol is a calamity...

In a shockingly beautiful new film called Precious, one of the most telling moments comes toward the end, and it's hardly more than a throwaway -- the heroine glances at a mirror and sees herself...

This Is It; Cirque du Soleil

podmaster@kcrw.org (Joe Morgenstern) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:44:00 EST

After all the media madness about Michael Jackson over all the years and decades, it comes as bittersweet news that he lives vividly in This Is It...

I've checked out two Cirques recently, a movie called Cirque du Freaks and the Cirque du Soleil, which is back in town and playing under a big blue-and-yellow tent next to the Santa Monica Pier...

Amelia

podmaster@kcrw.org (Joe Morgenstern) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:44:00 EST

I've seen the movie Amelia, and I can tell you that Amelia Earhart is still missing...

Where the Wild Things Are

podmaster@kcrw.org (Joe Morgenstern) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:44:00 EST

The movie version of Where the Wild Things Are honors the book in every imaginable way...and in ways no one could have imagined until Spike Jonze and his crew came long...

An Education

podmaster@kcrw.org (Joe Morgenstern) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:44:00 EST

This week brings a thrilling new film called An Education. It's a tale of an English schoolgirl's hard-won wisdom, and it's thrilling for all sorts of reasons...

An Education

podmaster@kcrw.org (Joe Morgenstern) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:44:00 EST

This week brings a thrilling new film called An Education. It's a tale of an English schoolgirl's hard-won wisdom, and it's thrilling for all sorts of reasons...

The Invention of Lying; Zombieland

podmaster@kcrw.org (Joe Morgenstern) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:44:00 EST

Nobody doesn't like Ricky Gervais, and his new comedy soars for a while on the wings of a clever premise: it's set in a world where everyone tells the truth. In the spirit of that world, I cannot tell a lie: The Invention of Lying...

Zombieland teems with wild-eyed chewers and spewers. They're only lurid wallpaper, though, in an improbably delicious comedy about a quartet of human survivors crossing an America that's been taken over by ravenous hordes...

Capitalism: A Love Story; Coco Before Chanel

podmaster@kcrw.org (Joe Morgenstern) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:44:00 EST

Michael Moore starts Capitalism: A Love Story with a sequence of secuirty-camera videos showing holdups in progress, and ends it by showing himself, like some vigilante version of the environmental artist Christo, stringing great lengths of yellow crime-scene tape around banks and brokerage houses in Lower Manhattan...

Clothes may make the man, but the woman makes the clothes in Coco before Chanel, Anne Fontaine's smart and sumptuous French-language account of the legendary designer during her early years when she, like her couture, was still ascending from basse to haute...

Bright Star

podmaster@kcrw.org (Joe Morgenstern) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:44:00 EST

Bright Star is Jane Campion's dramatization of the love affair between the young Romantic poet John Keats and his younger neighbor, Fanny Brawne. The production is modest in physical scale, mostly reserved in tone and touchingly simple in design (aside from Fanny's dazzling wardrobe, which is justified by her gifts as a seamstress.) But the effect is exhilarating and deeply pleasurable...