Click here for the flashback interview with John Krasinski for THE HOLLARS. John Krasinski’s great strength as a filmmaker is that he can capture the full spectrum of emotions, the fleeting bit of comfort in remembering a loved one who has died while the grief is still raw, or the poignant joy of remembering… Read More »
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COCAINE BEAR
COCAINE BEAR is a joyously peculiar amalgam of carnage, comedy, and horror that respects few rules of cinematic storytelling aside from insuring that (spoiler alert) the dog is okay. It’s an impudent thing that thumbs its nose at convention while seeing to it that, despite broken laws and the slaughter of innocent (and not so… Read More »
CYRANO
Joe Wright has a genius for taking the stories we know all too well and making them feel like a delightful new discovery. Seek no further than his take on ANNA KARENINA (interview here), which, pace fans of Garbo and Leigh, is my favorite adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic. Is it absolutely true to the source… Read More »
ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI…
The story of ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI was inspired by actual events, which leaves plenty of room for speculation about what Malcolm X, Cassius Clay (shortly to become Muhammad Ali), James Brown, and Sam Cooke talked about in that motel room on February 25, 1964. If it was less the dialectic presented here, what each… Read More »
HARRIET
HARRIET achieves the proper, and richly deserved, tone of reverence for its subject, Harriet Tubman. That is, alas, its greatest failing. The astonishing life of one of the most courageous Americans who has ever lived is told in a series of set pieces, vignettes with all drama sapped from them as they take on the… Read More »
LUCE
LUCE is less a film than a political dialectic on race and class in these United States, and a brilliant, exquisitely performed one at that. Told with a deliberate, sometimes maddening ambiguity, it challenges the audience at every turn about where the truth lies, and the limits of familial loyalty. By the end, not every… Read More »
PLUS ONE
Ben (Jack Quaid) and Alice (Maya Erskine) have reached that awkward age. Nearing thirty and still single, their lives have become a mad whirl of watching their friends and family pair up for the long haul with wedding vows, corny toasts, and too much champagne. Unable to further bear the stigma of being seated at… Read More »
SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING
Leaving aside what might otherwise be a richly nuanced discussion of why we need another Spider-man reboot so soon, it is with delight and relief that I report its success. Tom Holland takes on the red spandex and the ironic wisecracks as Peter Parker, the brilliant high-school kid whose bite from a radioactive spider has… Read More »
BASIC
The first words we hear Tom Hardy say in BASIC is in a conversation this ex-Army and currently DEA agent in Panama is having with a colleague, the gist of which is that if he doesnt have the trust of those around him, he cant function. Those are words that will figure greatly in the… Read More »