HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA: TRANSFORMANIA is a relentlessly obvious and overplayed exercise in draining the last dregs from a moribund franchise. Let me put it this way. Adam Sandler, not known for discriminating taste in projects, took a pass on this material that continues the saga of Drac, the vampiric proprietor of the titular establishment that caters… Read More »
THE MATRIX: RESURRECTIONS
THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS balances a vibrant cacophony of action with a criminally flabby script that takes far too long to get where it needs to go. It is a triumph of forthright, even giddy, self-awareness and nostalgia as Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) once again enters the Matrix as a neophyte taking us along for the… Read More »
HOUSE OF GUCCI
HOUSE OF GUCCI is a ramshackle accretion of muddled plots studded with oddly incoherent character development and performances that range from stock (Al Pacino) to enigmatic (Adam Driver). This overlong effort takes a tale of sex, money, and power among the super rich and renders it into a dull slog brightened only by Lady Gaga’s… Read More »
THE CARD COUNTER
With THE CARD COUNTER, writer/director Paul Schraeder returns to his favorite themes of sin and redemption. This is no tidy tale of a fall from grace precipated by a rash decision or a moment of weakness. We have at the center a flawed man with dark impulses that he cannot control once they have been… Read More »
THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE
For all the meticulous detail in THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE about the early life of Tammy Faye Bakker, this biopic about the rise of fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker has an ending that is curiously sparse. It’s not just Tammy Faye’s second marriage to Roe Messner that is erased, though he does… Read More »
NINE DAYS
With NINE DAYS, we are offered a metaphysical cosmology that reconciles why there is evil in the world with a need to believe that someone or something, somewhere, is watching over us and cares about what he or she or it sees. It is a devilishly complicated question, but filmmaker Edson Oda tackles it with… 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 »
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
Flames are never far from Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), starting with those lapping near, but not too near, his heels as he exits the house that he’s just set alight over the body he’s deposited beneath the floorboards. In Guillermo del Toro’s oneiric vision of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, NIGHTMARE ALLEY. Notice, too, the… Read More »
ETERNALS
There is quite a bit going on with THE ETERNALS, a bold attempt to marry CGI action on a grand scale with metaphysical musings about free will, while also contemplating the fundamental principles of physics vis a vis the conservation of energy in the universe. Like I said, a lot. Had it worked, it would… Read More »
ANTLERS
I don’t know that I subscribe to the idea that there are some works of prose that are “unfilmable.” This is not to say that a successsful translation from one art form to another doesn’t require a certain amount of compromise around the source material. Prose, while relying on the eyes in order to absorb… Read More »
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