Author: Robert Horton

Robert Horton has been a film critic in Seattle for about 30 years, yet he mysteriously retains the blush of youth. He comments on film for The Herald (Everett, Washington), KUOW-FM, the Seattle Channel and his blog The Crop Duster. He is also the curator and host of the monthly Magic Lantern series at the Frye Art Museum, a periodic contributor to Film Comment and other publications, and the author of Billy Wilder: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2001) and Frankenstein (Wallflower Press, 2009); his work was also included in Best American Movie Writing 1999 (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999) and the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers (St. James Press, 2000).

by Robert Horton, Contributors, Film Reviews

Film Review: ‘The Judge’

Written by Robert Horton February 16, 2026February 16, 2026

[Originally published in Seattle Weekly, October 7, 2014]

Leave out Robert Downey, Jr., and The Judge looks like a painfully old-fashioned exercise in the Tradition of Quality. Big-city defense attorney Hank Palmer (that’s Downey) comes home to Indiana just in time to see his father (Robert Duvall), a respected judge, arrested for vehicular homicide. Father and son do not care for each other, but the dominoes are poised to let Hank stick around and mount a spirited defense.

In the course of the trial, family dynamics are tested, Hank brushes up against an old girlfriend (Vera Farmiga), and zero coolness points are awarded to anyone involved in the movie. Well, maybe Billy Bob Thornton earns a few as a sleek prosecutor (think George C. Scott in Anatomy of a Murder), but otherwise this is a very square film, suitable for limited Oscar buzz and a safe choice for seeing with your parents.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: The Legend of Bagger Vance

Written by Robert Horton September 19, 2025September 19, 2025 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

As an actor and director, Robert Redford seems sincerely and deeply drawn to American mythology, from the mystic fishermen of A River Runs Through It to those western archetypes the Sundance Kid and Jeremiah Johnson to that most sacred of literary mysteries, The Great Gatsby. Every minute of The Natural oozes with the urge to create myth out of Americana, which may be why that movie feels like a Redford film even though it was directed by Barry Levinson.

Film Reviews

Review: The Horse Whisperer

Written by Robert Horton September 19, 2025September 19, 2025

[Originally written for Film.com, 1998]

Set the wayback machine to 1998. Parallax View presents reviews of films released 20 years ago, written by our contributors for various papers and websites. Most of these have not been available for years.

Except for a final helicopter shot, our last glimpse of Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer finds the star enjoying a pensive moment of mixed emotions. It’s the kind of wordless, ambiguous grace note that real movie stars are so good at evoking, a look in the eyes that conveys a dozen different feelings tugging at the same brain pan.

There are other such moments in The Horse Whisperer, but they all belong to Kristin Scott Thomas; Redford, directing himself for the first time, retreats into a mythic Marlboro Man stance until that intriguing climactic shot. For most of his performance, he’s either perched loftily at the edge of a valley or the foot of a mountain peak, and as often as not the sun is catching the still-golden tones in his ageless hair. This approach turns the movie into a handsome still life, bloodless and schematic. It’s particularly odd because so much of the film is given over to an Ordinary People-style psychological excavation, which doesn’t jibe especially well with the old-fashioned stoicism of the traditional cowboy.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: The House of Mirth

Written by Robert Horton November 9, 2020November 4, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

Gillian Anderson’s performance as Lily Bart in The House of Mirth is weirdly un-modern — the actress seems to have tapped directly into the mindset of the Edith Wharton novel, to a style predating ironic distance. Anderson maintains this even though the film’s dialogue and line readings are (rightly so) pitched in a way that heightens the artificial nature of the New York social scene, circa 1905. Anderson, whose performance often has a trapped, corseted intensity, gets Lily’s tragedy: It’s not that Lily doesn’t understand the rules of the game — it’s that she does, but she thinks her wit and beauty can skirt that calcified code.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews, Horror

2000 Eyes: Hollow Man

Written by Robert Horton October 30, 2020October 29, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

If Hollow Man doesn’t dive anywhere near the implications of its T.S. Eliot–inspired title, settling for the form and function of a summer movie, it nevertheless offers something extra. That extra is the edge provided by director Paul Verhoeven, the perverse Dutch master who brings his cruel, nasty personality to the party. Despite Showgirls, Verhoeven is a distinctive talent—sometimes incoherent, but often bracing.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Autumn in New York

Written by Robert Horton October 28, 2020October 20, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

Like most movies, Autumn in New York has a way of stating its themes in dialogue, so we don’t miss the point. In one scene, hip restaurateur Richard Gere asks his best buddy why he should continue a relationship with a much younger woman with a serious illness. The buddy, played by Anthony LaPaglia, shrugs in the down-to-earth way of movie best buddies and says, “Maybe it makes a sad girl happy and a desperate guy think.”

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Me, Myself & Irene

Written by Robert Horton October 23, 2020October 20, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

Of course the Farrelly brothers would make a split personality movie. It’s autobiographical: these filmmaking provocateurs are divided between sweet and sour, between the romance of classic screwball comedy and Mad magazine on acid.

So we get Me, Myself & Irene, a comedy about a Rhode Island cop who suffers from split personality disorder. In the gratifyingly wacky opening minutes of the film we meet Charlie (Jim Carrey), a nice guy stretched thin over thirty years of being a doormat. In a sequence that deliberately tramples taboos, Charlie melts down (in a line in a supermarket—perfect) and mutates into Hank, a belligerent jerk with no social boundaries.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Deterrence

Written by Robert Horton October 9, 2020September 29, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

The concept is a little gem out of the B-movie sourcebook: In the year 2008, the president of the United States is waylaid in a small Colorado roadhouse by a massive snowstorm. At that exact moment, the new leader of Iraq—evidently no improvement over the previous leader of Iraq—launches an invasion force into an easily overrun Kuwait. The president, flanked by a couple of aides and a group of very frightened diners, must instantly make a decision on the greatest weapon in the strategic arsenal: nuclear attack.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Lucky Numbers

Written by Robert Horton October 5, 2020September 29, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

The critical reaction to Sally Field’s directing debut, Beautiful, was interesting. That film — admittedly a mess — presented a self-centered, vain, cutthroat main character, a beauty contestant played by Minnie Driver. The response to the movie showed virtually no recognition that such a character might be presented as a source of satire, or be set up for eventual redemption (which, of course, she was). Instead, critics and audiences alike seemed outraged that anyone would presume to place such a lowlife at the center of a film. (We have come a long way from the anti-heroes of the 1970s, folks.)

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Pola X

Written by Robert Horton September 25, 2020September 22, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

Herman Melville’s novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities, was widely reviled when it was published, just as Leos Carax’s film of Pierre has been generally maligned. Melville’s book came along in the wide wake of a little thing called Moby-Dick, and even if it had not, it’s a very strange novel—seemingly a put-on of a certain kind of fruity romantic tale, but stretched past the point of parody. It’s weird, but interesting-weird.