By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic You couldn’t tell my Dad wrestling was fake. In his favorite chair, our little dog Tibble on his lap, he’d root with a fervor that we feared would kill him. Here was a man who lost almost everything in the Holocaust, started all over in America, and made a…
By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic Hearing yourself utter the plot description of “Bride Wars” makes you wonder if either you or the world has gone insane. At minimum, certainly it must cause you to lose millions of brain cells. But a critic must be intrepid. So here goes: Two best friends since childhood…
By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic You know that boring couple you’ve been promising to double with, but keep putting off for fear of the dead air that might permeate the evening? Call them now. Suggest you see “Doubt.” The film will take up 104 minutes. Following that, either at dinner or the coffee table…
By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic Happily ensconced in the magical, mystical, love- and life-affirming world of Benjamin Button, you won’t want director David Fincher’s film to end. Even after two hours and thirty-nine minutes, when the tub of popcorn is depleted, the box of Goobers a memory and nary a drop is left…
By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic If you look thither, way out there on the cutting edge of filmmaking, you’ll see the Brothers Coen, Ethan and Joel, who now gift us with “Burn After Reading.” A bit of gallows humor to cleanse the movie palate after “No Country for Old Men” (2007), its tongue…
By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic “Bangkok Dangerous” is so brazen a cliché that, as with the scalawag student who owns up to a transgression—“It was I, Mrs. Green, who stole the UNICEF collection can”—you must at least note the honesty. Ripping off their 1999 Thai version by the same name, twin brother-directors Oxide Pang…
By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic After seeing a bevy of summer blockbusters the movie equivalent of cigarette-smoking teenagers exchanging profanities in a littered 7-11 parking lot, director Isabel Coixet’s “Elegy” seems an artistic oasis. At last, a quiet dialogue with adults…intelligent ones, no less. Based on Philip Roth’s “The Dying Animal,” never mind…
By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic It helps if you dig the genre, a rock ‘n’ roll sliver of the old Show Biz tale that arguably began with Tommy Sands’s title role in the Kraft TV Theatre production of “The Singin’ Idol” (1957). Not that “The Rocker” will join that movie, “American Hot Wax”…
By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” a romantic tale with a pungent twist, is the sort of film that reminds you why it was you fell in love with going to the movies in the first place. Lampooning genre clichés nonetheless dear to him, the master craftsman reworks great old…
By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic Lest you fear that “Pineapple Express” and other films of its ilk are a sign that the apocalypse is nigh, take heart, Pops. Yep, we’ve been here before. What’s old is again new. While I’d like to take credit for dubbing this stuff The New Raunchiness, those with a…
