Peter Murmann

Ocean’s 11 struck me as sterile. The third episode of the George Clooney’s star vehicle has considerable charm. An old friend of Ocean (Clooney) gets screwed by a ruthless Vegas casino owner (Al Pacino). Ocean rounds up his gang of thieves to rectify this injustice. I loved the final sentence when George Clooney and Matt [Read More]

Anthony Hopkins plays a sociopath similar to the one he portrayed in Silence of the Lambs. Hopkins’ character shoots his wife when he discovers she is cheating on him with a police officer. Without any remorse, he tries to get off the hook for the murder by outsmarting the good-looking district attorney. The film is [Read More]

Isn’t it interesting that people have such a soft spot for bank robbers?  Forcing a grandmother to hand over all her savings and shooting her right in the head would not make a good story. But robbing a bank does not stir peoples’ indignation. The impersonal bank is not perceived to be a real victim. [Read More]

How would you feel if you suddenly found out that you were a totally different person until a few years ago and if you did not remember anything about your previous life? (My fear is that I might discover out that I was George Bush. ) For two installments Jason Bourne has been trying to [Read More]

Sandra Bullocks plays a good-looking mother who is visited by the most awful kind of deja vu experiences you can imagine.  She no longer knows what is real and what is simply a hallucination. I was moved by the film because it artfully highlights how we can quickly fall apart when our brains are no [Read More]

This is probably the most inane movie I have seen in a long time. The characters are fake; the story is shallow. But here comes the real shocker:  the viewing public made the film the bestselling DVD in month of September.  Famous actors (Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy, Ray Liotta, [Read More]

It is difficult to put this film into standard categories. I would call it a tragic comedy. Set in Texas and Iowa in the 1960s, the film wonderfully captures the life and transformation of middle class America. The constant bickering between the mother (Shirley MacLaine) and her daughter (Debra Winger) reminded me of A Streetcar [Read More]

Terrible, terrible, even for an airplane movie! The movie is lame, cheesy and uninspired. Carter gets dumped by his famous L.A. girlfriend. Next he moves in with his ailing grandmother to write a novel about his high school time he has not been able to write for the past 8 years. Confirming that location [Read More]

Eddie Murphy latest comic film brings Cinderella into the hood.  Little Norbit grows up in an orphanage. His bliss comes to end when his buddy Kate gets adopted. Norbit is not the smartest fellow in the universe. But who says that Cinderella was a genius. This film has very funny scenes and at times is [Read More]

Biographical films often stumble precisely because they try to cover an entire lifetime. The viewer finds it disorienting when multiple actors play one and the same person during childhood, teenage years, adulthood and old age. Just when you have gotten used to a person and learned enough to feel a connection with her, a new [Read More]