In THE PHANTOM OF THE OPEN, we see the audacity of innocence. Based on the life, and wholly unlikely exploits, of Maurice Flitcroft, a name that all but demands to have a shaggy-dog story attached to it, it reveals how a man with no formal training in golf found himself competing at the British Open,… Read More »
SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME
There is such a delicious and perfectly logical, surprise in SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME, that it alone would be worth the investment of your time and your money to see it in a theater. Fortunately, there is so much more to enjoy as Peter Parker (Tom Holland) and those in his orbit face a future… Read More »
LEN AND COMPANY
The eponymous Len, of LEN AND COMPANY is Len Black (Rhys Ifans), a successful record producer and towering failure of a human being, who has absented himself from the world in order the ponder the detritus of his life. He longs for silence, or at least no music of any kind in his rustic upstate… Read More »
ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
There could be many reasons to eschew the story that Lewis Carroll himself wrote about Alice and her adventures through the looking glass. Alas, Disney’s ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS does not find any of them. There is a perfect madness in that book that the script by Linda Woolverton fails to capture. Instead we… Read More »
PIRATE RADIO
What PIRATE RADIO does that is so remarkable is to capture as closely as a film can what it was like to be a fan of rock & roll at a time when it was considered not just noise, but actual subversion. Of course, in a way it was. This music was the anthem of… Read More »
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN
With only five years since the last Spiderman blockbuster, it might have seemed too soon to reboot the franchise, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, however, puts such worries to rest. The screenwriter is Steve Kloves, who has a keen understanding of character and story as evidence in his scripts for the Harry Potter films. Hes working up… Read More »
ANONYMOUS
ANONYMOUS has a great many things going for it. A rich and suitably literate script by John Orloff. A director, Roland Emmerich, with a flair for the dramatic that meshes well with the intrigues of Elizabethan England. A special effects budget that allows the screen to be filled with vast panoramas of 16th-century London, as… Read More »