★★★½ The Apartment

[Gino: 3.5]

This best-picture oscar winner is a dramedy about a guy who lends his apartment to coworkers for them to have affairs, and by doing so rises quickly up the corporate ladder. But the logistics cause problems in his own love life. It helped that I was unaware of the plot before seeing this (not that there is any edge-of-your-seat plot or anything). However, Jack Lemmon is great. His acting is a little spastic, but on the other hand, really "precise". He does a lot of little things, barely perceptable. I bet watching his performance a second time, one would pick up more things. And Shirley MacLaine is quite good too as a very depressed but cute-as-a-button elevator operatrix. Meanwhile Fred MacMurry is unintentionally(?) funny as the cartoonishly-macho evil boss and third point of the love triangle. In the end neither the love story nor the drama nor the comedy really sucked me in. But the charisma of the main actors and the nice big-budget hollywood production (incl. Panavision) pulled this one through for me... recommendation-wise.