Leonard Maltin

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film review: Solitary Man

By Leonard Maltin
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May 21, 2010 4:00 AM
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3 Comments

Michael Douglas has nothing to fear, so he’s perfectly willing to play a role other actors might run away from: a 60-ish New Yorker who’s a complete and utter louse. Once he married his college sweetheart and owned a string of car dealerships; now all he’s got left is his gift of gab, which can still win over almost any woman, young or old. But without a moral compass, he makes one bad decision after another, causing his personal and professional life to crumble…and he has no one to blame but himself.

By Leonard Maltin
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May 21, 2010 4:00 AM
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2 Comments

A good movie starts with an idea. In the case of Holy Rollers, a news item about a drug bust involving Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn, New York inspired a novice producer to believe that this could be the springboard for a film…and he was right. Holy Rollers is a piece of fiction inspired by that factual incident. It’s modest in its ambitions but realizes them fully, in a deceptively simple, stragithforward film that’s both satisfying and thought-provoking.

Jesse Eisenberg is well cast as Shmuel, or Sam, a young man who’s working with his father in the garment business and studying to be a rabbi. Yet he feels restless and dissatisfied, frustrated over his family’s chronic lack of money. This makes him susceptible to the advances of—

By Leonard Maltin
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May 19, 2010 3:59 AM
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1 Comment

Book Review: MACK SENNETT’S FUN FACTORY by Brent E. Walker
(McFarland)

The first book I ever read about movie history was Mack Sennett’s autobiography, King of Comedy. I had been exposed to silent comedy shorts on TV and then in Robert Youngson’s ground-breaking documentary The Golden Age of Comedy. I was hooked, and simply had to know more about these fascinating slapstick films and the people who made them. So I went to my local library in Teaneck, New Jersey and borrowed Sennett’s book—one of the few then available about that era—and read it over and over again.

Sennett’s book was just as colorful as I’d hoped it would be. He told the story of how he drifted into the movie business in New York, attached himself to the great D.W. Griffith, got his first break, met and fell in love with beautiful Mabel Normand, convinced two bookies to finance his Keystone studio, discovered Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Harry Langdon, and—

By Leonard Maltin
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May 18, 2010 6:11 AM
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0 Comments

How can a film that’s more than eighty years old seem fresh and modern? That’s the marvel of Rene Clair’s silent gem The Italian Straw Hat (1927), which has been lovingly restored by producer David Shepard for DVD release through Jeffery Masino’s Flicker Alley. If you’ve never seen the picture, you owe it to yourself to experience its wit and charm, which is comparable to the finest work of Ernst Lubitsch…yet it is distinctly, unmistakably French. While its source material (an emblematic stage farce written in 1851) was already well-worn by the late 1920s, Clair put his own stamp on it by changing—

By Leonard Maltin
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May 17, 2010 6:48 AM
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0 Comments

Please Give | Leonard Maltin's Secret's Out | Movie Trailers

By Leonard Maltin
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May 13, 2010 4:30 AM
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28 Comments

I went into this film with a “show me” attitude, but I freely admit it won me over. In spite of a few quibbles, I came away entertained. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay to director Ridley Scott, screenwriter Brian Helgeland, and their cast is that I didn’t find myself comparing their work to Robin Hoods past. They have managed to put their stamp on a familiar tale without completely subverting it.

By Leonard Maltin
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May 13, 2010 4:16 AM
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9 Comments

If you ask my daughter, there’s only one Robin Hood that matters: the Disney animated feature from 1973 with Phil Harris (channeling Baloo the Bear from The Jungle Book) in the role of Little John. If you ask me or most of my film-buff pals we’ll reflexively point to Errol Flynn in the ageless Technicolor swashbuckler The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), as perfect a movie as one could ever ask for, with superb production values and a cast that can’t be beat. Yet I wonder if some moviegoers in 1938 approached that film grumbling that no one could replace Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. After all, Fairbanks was the movies’ first great swashbuckler, and he put his indelible brand on such characters as Zorro, D’Artagnan, and Robin Hood. (Indeed, in his New York Times review on May 13, 1938, Frank S. Nugent was obliged to observe, “Mr. Flynn is not the acrobatic Robin Douglas Fairbanks was some years ago. He doesn’t slide down tapestries or vault the balustrades with—

By Leonard Maltin
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May 10, 2010 6:51 AM
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5 Comments

There are some days you just can’t forget. On March 13, 1993, I was given the opportunity to watch Lena Horne film her introductions for That’s Entertainment! III and interview her for Entertainment Tonight. The setting was the recording stage where Horne and all the MGM stars and musicians worked during the “golden age.” (Never mind that it was now the Sony Pictures lot; the stage itself hadn’t changed a bit.) The fabled hairdresser to the stars, Sydney Guilaroff, had come out of retirement to take care of Ms. Horne that day, and Roddy McDowall was there with his camera to take pictures of the historic happenings.

By Leonard Maltin
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May 7, 2010 4:01 AM
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13 Comments

The best thing I can say about Iron Man 2 is also the worst thing I can say about it: it’s a sequel. Kids will probably like it fine; there’s plenty of action and it’s easy to follow. But big-league comic-book movies want to appeal to adults as well as kids these days, and it’s not easy to serve both constituencies.

There’s also no reason a sequel can’t be good. The Godfather Part II and Toy Story 2 remain the pinnacle of such achievements—the exceptions to the rule. In the comic-book movie realm, X2 built upon the success of X-Men, and Spider-Man 2 improved upon—

By Leonard Maltin
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May 7, 2010 4:00 AM
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0 Comments

I love the work of writer-director Rodrigo Garcia, and bemoan the fact that more people haven’t seen his female-centric anthology films Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her and Nine Lives. It’s evident that actors are familiar with his efforts, however, because the best and the brightest want to work with him. For Mother and Child, he has narrowed his focus to three parallel (and overlapping) stories, and once again he’s attracted great actresses to star: Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, and Kerry Washington.

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Categories

film review: Solitary Man

film review: Holy Rollers

The Original King of Comedy

The Italian Straw Hat

secret's out: A Closer Look at Please Give

film review: Robin Hood

Remembering Other Robin Hoods

On The Set With Lena Horne

film review: Iron Man 2

film review: Mother And Child

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