At two hours, the movie is a half hour too long.

Regulars will recognize my rule: no comedy–almost no movie–needs more than 90 minutes to tell its story. There is nothing cheaper than a movie review that just lists the cast. Call me cheap.

How can you go wrong with Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci reinhabiting their roles as if slipping into a prom dress/suit that still fits 20 years later. Plus the added attraction of Kenneth Branagh and Lucy Liu. The answer is you can’t go wrong.

Bathed in the golden glow of nostalgia, but updated with care. If only it were 30 minutes shorter.

I like it. I really like it. Bart Layton hasn’t laid electron to screen in eight years, but it was worth the wait. His adaptation of a Don Winslow Novella proves there’s still room in Hollywood for a novel as original intellectual property: no superheroes, no explicit sex, just good dialogue and a clever plot. Give this man the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

Continued Here

Happy Groundhog Day.  Be sure to take your annual look at the greatest movie ever made after you have looked at the best fan site: Groundhog Day The Movie, Buddhism and Me .

Make your way swiftly to a theater for this delightful meditation on friendship and the effects of the choices we make. I agree with the critic who said this is a career-defining role for George Clooney. The only thing Hollywood likes more than rain is a movie about Hollywood. It’s all about them. Writers are usually told to “write what you know.” Clearly some of them need to get out more, but only after writing a movie this good. The essence of the story would be the same even if Clooney was playing an accountant. Yes it’s coming soon to Netflix. Support movie theaters, or else you will miss them when they are gone.

(Six stars out of 5)

This is the most important movie I have ever seen. I’m not going to get into the acting (amazing), the writing (equally amazing) or the length—2 ½ hours, an hour longer than I usually tolerate. Telling this story required every second. My discussion will stick to the content, which everyone should see.

The movie concentrates on Hermann Wilhelm “I know nothing” Göring, a charming and personable guy you’d like to have a beer with, who is a supreme narcissist, completely devoid of empathy for the victims of his actions.

The movie dissects the long-asked question: how are the Germans different from us? The film answers it: they just watched things happen and did nothing.

There is not a line in this movie about international law, as established at the Nuremburg trials, that doesn’t have modern parallels.

As a student of the Second World War and its aftermath, I can tell you this movie truly represents the results of the trial, even if some details are invented to make a good story. Amazingly, the psychiatrist interviewing Göring was not made up.

Will it change the mind of your Uncle who will bloviate at Thanksgiving? Probably not. Will it help you understand what is going on now? Yes.

One Battle After Another was  written, produced, and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s nowhere near as precious as Wes Anderson (no relation), but he does have his style: dense and intellectual. I enjoyed the film, even though it violated the my prime directive: no film needs to be more than 90 minutes long. It was, basically, three hours, which cost it one star.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know the male leads are Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro. The women are incredible, but to me at least, unknowns.

It is a cliché, usually applied to Morgan Freeman, that you would pay to hear him reading the phonebook (We’re going to need to replace that idiom, for obvious reasons). I would pay just to see these three men make stern faces.

It’s about 60s radicals who never got over the revolution, the damage one of them did to her child, and their nemesis, Col. Steve Lockjaw. Really? I guess since there are no phonebooks anymore, lazy screenwriters can’t just pick a name out of the book.

One of the best things about the film is the mixture of deadly seriousness (literally deadly) with some laugh-out-loud one liners (at the expense of the characters). That’s what makes this self-serious piece of work especially easy to watch.

She had me at la dee dah.

We have suffered a great loss in the world of cinema. Diane Keaton has died at 79. She was a star from her first moment on the screen to her last. She was spared the sad fate of so many movie stars, who spend decades outliving their fame. She worked up until last year, and was as great as ever. Hollywood can actually find roles for older women, if it tries.

She was almost certainly the only woman who had both Warren Beatty (1 movie) and Woody Allen (8 movies) as lovers.

Her acting style was amazing. She was typecast, in a way, as a ditz, but showed range in many roles. She seemed to be playing herself much of the time, but since we don’t know her, we can’t be sure. It seems unlikely. She made it look easy, and every actor I have ever heard describing their craft says “It is extremely hard work to make it look easy.” Acting is like being a duck: calm and placid on the surface, paddling away furiously under the water.

She will be missed.

But First, this important massage from the Swedish Prime Minister: Naked Gun opened Friday. I literally laughed at every scene. Please go see it.

More writing making you conscious of my writing about the writing of this column.

When the Internet began, I was so excited. Free of the constraints of paper, Internet articles could be as long or short (almost never short) as they needed to be. As the old saying goes, an article should be like a man’s shorts: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.

That length appears to be 750 words, the length of a N.Y. Times op-ed article. That is the aspirational length, not the prescriptive length of this column each week. It restrains my darker instincts. Just like cheap Hollywood movies; you have to be more creative when you are constrained.

The single most important event in the world this week is the opening, on Friday, of the new Naked Gun movie. Don’t fail to miss it (inside joke for the three readers who will get it).

Probably a little late, certainly a little bit short on detail. Jane Austen Ruined My Life is great and French, and despite that a quite lovely film which does not draw on the French Cinema’s endless supply of existential angst. Phoenician Scheme is an entertaining dark comedy which has more stars then there are in heaven (yes an MGM reference) and features Wes Anderson at his Wes Andersoniest (throwback to my own Nick Cage locution—which I promise not to use again for a few weeks)