Posts Tagged ‘Julianne Moore’

Maggie’s Plan Review

Posted: March 2, 2016 in 2016 Berlinale, Comedy, Reviews
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Maggie's PlanMaybe this one works with Amy Schumer in the lead.

And you slide Bill Hader over from best guy friend to goofball sperm donor.

Certainly, it would help if you give Maya Rudolph considerably more to do.

And definitely the odds improve if you show Julianne Moore the door.

But as it stands, Maggie’s Plan, a would-be romantic comedy, fails on both counts – it’s neither sweet nor funny. The movie wants so badly to be a New York City/Manhattan/Center of the Hipster Universe/Cool Kids Only Need Apply edgy, indie happening, but it misses by a mile and winds up as a atonal mess in which the comics beats are stepped on by stressful scenes of working women scrambling to raise their children or someone else’s children or both. (more…)

Maps to the Stars Review

Posted: September 21, 2014 in Reviews
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Maps to the StarsMaps to the Stars premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in April of this year, competing for the Palme d’Or as best picture and earning a best actress award for Julianne Moore. The takeaway from that success for the casual filmgoer may be somewhat misleading. Just as many went to see Black Swan after hearing of Natalie Portman’s performance as a troubled ballerina only to be shocked that director Darren Aronofsky had used horror film conventions to tell his story of a dancer descending into a hellish madness, so, too, may some viewers be lured into this movie by incorrect expectations. Maps to the Stars is not a mainstream motion picture. Director David Cronenberg was, is, and always will be, a genre director. That is not intended as an insult or a limitation. Is it a knock on Hitchcock to say he was a director of thrillers? The brilliance of Cronenberg’s filmography is self-evident; his influence on the industry well documented. From the venereal horror productions of They Came From Within and Rabid through the sci-fi mind screws of Videodrome, The Fly, and eXistenZ with stops along the way to look at the outcasts on the fringes of society in Naked Lunch, M.Butterfly, and Crash, Cronenberg has been directing the most demanding, challenging, and prophetic of genre films for almost 40 years.

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