Wes Anderson’s ASTEROID CITY presents us a dream within a dream as it ponders our place in the cosmos by setting its story in three separate realities that bump into each other the way subatomic particles swarm around an atomic nucleus. Is it synchronicity or chance or some other cosmic law of which humanity is… Read More »
SEE HOW THEY RUN
SEE HOW THEY RUN is a handsomely mounted period piece with a clever premise undermined by an irksome dithering about its tone and a rampant directorial lethargy. Calling out tropes from cinema and literary mysteries with the sort of wild abandon from which the pacing would have profited, this uneven comedy takes us to 1953,… Read More »
CADILLAC RECRDS
Writer/director Darnell Martin has an obvious passion for the blues and for the men and women who sang them. It comes across in every frame of CADILLAC RECORDS, based on the true story of Chess Records, whose founder, Leonard Chess, had a penchant for handing out Cadillacs to his recording artists. Executive producer and pop… Read More »
THE BROTHERS BLOOM
The successful con is the one where everyone gets what they want. Its a statement that is profound in its simplicity. The same is true of THE BROTHERS BLOOM, where the premise is postulated and then proven with a deceptively simple plot that hides in plain sight. The brothers in question are Stephen (Mark Ruffalo)… Read More »
PREDATORS
PREDATORS is a murky, would-be pedantic, mess of a flick. It goes to the trouble of informing its audience that it is a continuation of 1987s PREDATOR, but takes no trouble before or after to deliver any reason for revisiting the premise of humans hunted for sport by aliens who have conquered invisibility cloaks. The… Read More »
THE PIANIST
Truth can be and often is stranger than fiction and so it is with the true story of pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who through chutzpah and luck managed to escape the clutches of the uber-efficient Nazi death machine. His experiences have been rendered with a melancholy poetry by Roman Polanski, who as a… Read More »
THE JACKET
THE JACKET begins as an intriguing, even unsettling consideration of time, space, and the nature of reality. But in a twist as breathtaking as it is unexpected, it commits the mortal sin of becoming conventional. Its all the more disappointing because of its director, John Maybury, a filmmaker and artist who was iconoclast Derek Jarmans… Read More »
KING KONG
The first thing that comes to mind after seeing Peter Jackson’s KING KONG is wow. Make that WOW. He’s done the seemingly impossible: followed up his magnificent LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy with a film that cements his reputation as a director that can deliver big films that aren’t afraid to wear their hearts on… Read More »
HOLLYWOODLAND
HOLLYWOODLAND deals with the death of George Reeves, television’s Superman and the idol of millions of kids who were devastated by not just his passing, but that it was reported to have been suicide. It was during a party at his house, when he went upstairs and was later found with a bullet through his… Read More »
SPLICE
Before Oppenheimer and company at the Manhattan Project detonated their first A-bomb on the Alamogordo testing grounds way back in 1945, they were almost completely positive that the resulting chain reaction would stop at some point, probably, very probably, long before it destroyed the planet. Science is not without its risks and when humans start… Read More »