Irma P Hall
A Family Thing Review
OK
This review is not going to win me many new friends. Already, the gushing praise has begun, and it appears A Family Thing is going to be a regular Critic's Darling. I have little doubt that momentum will give the film the best reviews of the year to date, and I have an equal suspicion that few people are going to see it.
Best described as Driving Miss Daisy 2, A Family Thing is a way-way-melodramatic picture about an aging, backwards, racist, Arkansas hick, Earl Pilcher (Robert Duvall). Earl's mother, on her death bed, writes him a letter, telling Earl that in reality, she was not his mother at all, that his real mother was a black woman, and that she died having him in childbirth. Mom #2 implores him to seek out his half-brother in Chicago, for reasons never really explained.
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Collateral Review
By David Thomas
Very Good
There are two kinds of roller coasters. The most modern kind uses maglev technology to take you from 0 to 100mph in a matter of seconds. The old-school kind slowly creeps you up an incline before letting gravity pull you down at sickening speeds. Collateral is definitely the latter, and actually delivers more in the build-up than the plummet.
Cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) is having an ordinary night until he picks up Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith). They have a pleasant, interesting conversation, which director Michael Mann lets unfold at a natural, almost seductive pace. When they finally part ways, you feel as if you've watched a short romantic comedy. Enter Vincent (Tom Cruise).
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The Ladykillers Review
Weak
The Coen Brothers flopped with last year's comedically clumsy and questionably hammy "Intolerable Cruelty," and now that they have repeated and amplified the same arched-performance mistakes in "The Ladykillers," I am beginning to understand what it is about Joel and Ethan's movies that their detractors dislike so much.
The characters in the Coens' recent comedies have frequently been oblivious to the world beyond their whimsical capers, and in these last two pictures even the protagonists have become objects for audience ridicule, making them poor surrogates for getting us involved in their stories.
Tom Hanks takes that bullet in this loose remake of a 1955 British laffer about a band of crooks inadvertently foiled by the little old landlady who rents them a room. All toothy, affected mannerisms and blabbering balderdash as the endlessly loquacious supposed mastermind of the criminal enterprise, his character is nothing but caricature -- an over-educated, old-fashioned, pocket-watch-and-hankie type Southern gentleman who goes by the tongue-tying moniker of Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D.
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