So maybe you have a film franchise that is running out of steam. Maybe one of the stars wants out. Maybe his character was killed off to accommodate that. Maybe an actress has an idea for reviving that franchise with some panache and a dash of ovarian power. You can’t help thinking that one of… Read More »
AMERICAN ANIMALS
Click here to listen to the interview with Bart Layton. At a pivotal moment in Bart Layton’s emotionally charged AMERICAN ANIMALS, a character looks out of the car in which he is riding and sees the real person on whom he is based staring back at him as the car glides by. It’s not a… Read More »
SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY
Click here for the flashback interview with Alden Ehrenreich for BEAUTIFUL CREATURES. SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY annotates and amplifies the mythos surrounding that devilish anti-hero of the franchise, Han Solo. Set well before the events of EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE, it introduces us to Han before he learned to fly, but after he… Read More »
A QUIET PLACE
Why lob blood and guts when a lamp being knocked over can make you jump out of your seat?
AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR
For sheer value-for-money, you can’t top AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. It’s pure entertainment with an endless parade of the kind of whiz-bang special effects, not quite sloppy sentiment, and a constant barrage of the quips and banter that define grace under pressure in the Marvel Universe. Plus, pretty much everyone from the MCU finds his or… Read More »
I FEEL PRETTY
Amy Schumer. What the hell happened? Blazing into theaters with TRAINWRECK, a film that gleefully subverted rom-coms with extreme prejudice, she is now flailing through I FEEL PRETTY, her second disaster in a row. That both of them (the other was SNATCHED) were the very genre she set on fire is an irony that, perhaps,… Read More »
BEIRUT
BEIRUT opens before the Lebanese Civil War with U.S. diplomat Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm), on the last good day of his life, using a brilliant analogy to explain the political situation in Lebanon to his party guests in that eponymous city. Even the way the guests have arranged themselves, as Skiles put it: Christians on… Read More »
READY PLAYER ONE
With Steven Spielberg, sometimes, most of the time, you get E.T: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL. Sometimes, though, you get 1941. It’s not that READY PLAYER ONE rivals the sheer ineptitude of the latter, but it is definitely skirting the shoals. With Spielberg, one has come to expect much, and so when presented with a flick that is… Read More »
UNSANE
For me, the single most disconcerting image in a Steven Soderbergh film is from CONTAGION. It’s not a panorama of people dying from the pandemic that threatens to end civilization as we know it, instead it’s the silent, dispassionately clinical shot of Gwyneth Paltrow’s head being autopsied. There are people I know who reference the… Read More »
ACTORS OF SOUND
One of my favorite cinema stories is about KING KONG and the trouble it ran into with the censors even in that pre-Code time of 1933. It wasn’t Fay Wray in her slinky satin negligee, it wasn’t dinosaurs tearing each other apart. No, the only censored bit of KING KONG was the sound of Kong… Read More »
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