Bill Murray
Movie Review: The Friend
3.5 stars out of 5I’ll tell you what the ads won’t: Bill Murray is barely in this movie. His presence is in the movie, but the physical Bill — not so much. So if he’s your only reason for seeing it… don’t. For everyone else, this is a solid, slow-paced, grown-up movie about grief, loneliness, […]
Movie Review: Ghostbusters — Frozen Empire
3.5 stars out of 5I have gone on record more than once declaring that bustin’ makes me feel good. Aided by a generous dose of nostalgia, Ghostbusters: Afterlife even snuck onto my top-10 films of 2022. And yet, I did not rush to the theater to see this follow-up. Why not? Was some mysterious paranormal […]
Movie Review: Ant-Man and the Wasp—Quantumania
2 stars out of 5It was a drizzly winter day on the Jersey shore and I had hours to kill. “Oh, I’ll see a movie,” I thought. Alas, Asbury Park’s art theater isn’t open mid-week in the off-season. I had no choice but to go to the mall multiplex. This, of course, was no problem […]
Movie Review: Ghostbusters — Afterlife
4 stars out of 5Ghostbusters is my jam. It was perfection when I was 15: an ideal blend of smart, silly, juvenile, and flat-out funny. I’ll always remember being at my buddy John’s house for New Year’s Eve; at midnight we discovered that HBO was playing Ghostbusters, and even though we’d both seen it in […]
Movie Review: The French Dispatch
4.5 stars out of 5Or maybe 4 out of 5, but, somewhere in there. As I’ve said a number of times, there are a handful of directors that I am absolutely crazy about, and Wes Anderson is one of them. Perhaps I’m too soft on them or perhaps I hold them to too high a […]
Movie Review: On the Rocks
4 stars out of 5A bunch of people seemed surprised that I went to a movie theater. They’re perhaps forgetting that for the overwhelming majority of films I go to see, the attendance has always been well under 25% capacity. Regardless, going to the movies was one of the main things I’ve missed during the […]
Movie Review: The Dead Don’t Die
4.5 stars out of 5 Yes, I respond very positively to movies that are well-made and entertaining. But when a film also appeals to your own bizarro subset of sensibilities, that’s a rare and special thing, and that’s what The Dead Don’t Die is to me. Either independent movies used to be quirkier or I […]
Movie Review: St. Vincent
3 stars out of 5 I should’ve waited till Thanksgiving. This is the perfect see-with-the-folks-on-Thanksgiving movie: not good, not bad, but not offensive, and eminently watchable. Maybe I’ll see it again, if it’s still playing. Bill Murray does something interesting in St. Vincent: He acts. This is not necessarily a good thing: Like George Clooney, […]
Movie Review: The Monuments Men
3 stars out of 5 Due to crappy weather and even crappier offerings at the box office (which is never really a surprise either after the holidays or in late summer), I had not been to the movies yet in 2014. But I am an unrepentant Cloonephile, so I finally got around to seeing Monuments […]
Movie Review: Hyde Park on Hudson
4 stars out of 5 If there was a TV channel with just Bill Murray playing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Laura Linney as his cousin Daisy, I would probably spend entirely too much time watching it, ignoring basic standards of hygiene and socialization. This movie is simply that comfortable, with a well-sustained, calming mood. Now, […]
Jack Silbert, curator