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 »
THE MIDNIGHT SKY
It feels right to have a film about the end of the world be a cold thing, literally and figuratively. And so it is with THE MIDNIGHT SKY, a story set three decades or so in the future is an uncertain blend of personal regret with planetary destruction. Set both in the arctic and in… Read More »
MINARI
MINARI is a powerful contemplation of family, faith, and the American Dream. Seen through the lens of 7-year-old David (Alan S. Kim in a stunning, unselfconscious turn), whose Korean-born parents have moved him, his older sister Anne (Noel Cho), and eventually their grandmother (scene-stealing Youn Yuh-jung) to rural 1980s Arkansas in search of a life… Read More »
I’M YOUR WOMAN
As we learn at the start of I’M YOUR WOMAN, Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) is living a life of comfort, security, and irritating tedium in 1970s suburbia. Ensconced in a mid-century classic in an affluent neighborhood, she is quietly smoking as she goes over where her life when wrong, as in not having children with her… Read More »
NEWS OF THE WORLD
NEWS OF THE WORLD is a somber and sober tale of post-Civil War Texas with few surprises as it wends its way through the mythos of the Old West, unfolding as it does as a metaphor. Or is it an allegory? Perhaps a microcosm of the world’s ills, both then and now? All those elements… Read More »
FATALE
FATALE is a densely plotted and devilishly twisted erotic fantasy of a noir. Filmed with self-conscious style, it offers a variation on FATAL ATTRACTION that is not without merit, yet with a bemused view of womanhood that gives one pause. We are firmly ensconced in the, admittedly noir Madonna/whore paradigm here, but making a woman… Read More »
ANTEBELLUM
Of the many neat twists in ANTEBELLUM, the most disturbing of all is the one that concerns the state of race relations in the modern day, and how slavery still informs it. By contrasting the subtle, and not so subtle, micro-aggressions forced upon people of color in the present with the brutality of slavery as… Read More »
I SAW THE LIGHT
I SAW THE LIGHT was originally set for an autumn 2015 release with an eye towards positioning Tom Hiddleston’s performance as Hank Williams for Oscar™ consideration. I can see why they thought there would be awards buzz. I can also see why they pulled it from its original release date. Hiddleston is brilliant as the… Read More »
MULAN
There are several volumes of sophisticated feminist theory at work in the live-action version of MULAN, but, trust me, they are wholly in the service of a first-rate action-adventure film that puts characters ahead of spectacle. Director Niki Caro has created a film that is intense, compelling, and entirely entertaining, while Liu Yifei as the… Read More »
TESLA
Quiet in tone, and visually arresting, TESLA tells the story of a man whose perspective had only the most tangential relationship to that of the mere mortals who surrounded him. Michael Almereyda film echoes that with a high-minded tone-poem that mixes fact and fiction to achieve an emotional and intellectual, if not factual, truth. The… Read More »
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