Dolittle could have done a lot more
Movie review: Dolittle
Robert Downey Jr. dons Victorian garb and a Welsh accent for his turn as a dotty vet with a particular gift in this grim take on a kid-lit classic that lacks authenticity, despite the realistic creatures.
Jay Stone’s Top 10 movies of 2019
(Along with one honourable mention and one movie that every one else loved conspicuous by its absence)
By Jay Stone
Here are my favourite movies of 2019, in alphabetical order:
Honeyland: An amazing documentary, filmed in Macedonia, about a female beekeeper who lives with her ailing mother in rocky isolation, and harvests honey in a way compatible with her deep understanding of the life of bees. This hard-scrabble harmony is disrupted by a family of raucous nomads who move next door. The result is a galvanizing drama about society, greed, culture and, well, bees.
Gloria Bell: Sebastián Lelio’s remake of his own 2013 Spanish-language movie Gloria stars Julianne Moore as a divorcee who assuages her loneliness at dance clubs, and John Turturro as the constricted man who falls for her. The final scene, with the magnificent Moore dancing to the titular disco hit, is one of the great cinematic shouts of joy of the year.
Jojo Rabbit: New ...
Beautiful day in the Oscarhood: Academy Award hopes of TIFF
The Toronto film festival features several movies that could be in the discussion for this year's top movie awards, Jay Stone writes
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — The Toronto film festival is known as a launching pad for Oscar movies. Here are a few of the early contenders.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The re-evaluation of Fred Rogers — from figure of fun in a thousand parodies of his children’s program to American hero in a famous Esquire magazine article to secular sainthood in the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? — continues in this movie that’s actually based on that Esquire article. Tom Junod, an investigative journalist, was assigned in 1998 to do a short profile of Rogers (Tom Hanks) and emerged with a 10,000-word cover story that painted him as an unexpected wise man, a life coach whose simple wisdom could heal fractures of the heart. It was as if Being There had come to life as a puppet show for children.
In this ...
Knight of Cups runneth over
Movie Review: Knight of Cups
Drinking in Terrence Malick's imagery of deeply saturated Los Angeles will leave you in a mental stupor, but that seems to be the point of this meditation on movies
